Ten Things I (Pretend to) Know About Life at Twenty-Nine
Because twenty-nine things was too much
The interior life of a twenty-nine year old is quite dull. I am becoming less and less interested in what goes on in my own mind, and more and more interested in what goes on in the minds of adults above the age of sixty. A dinner party with all of my friends’ parents and grandparents sounds incredible. Whenever I sit down to write, I pretend I am a sixty-year old woman named Marianne who has a midlife crisis and does something crazy with deviled eggs during Thursday night book club. Maybe it will go somewhere.
A romantic relationship that lasts more than five years does, (un)fortunately, need to become work. Scheduling is not sexy and productive communication can feel like swallowing nails. You do not, from my experience, leave all of these important discussions (a word I prefer to “argument”) feeling better. The discussions do not always end with insight. They go better in my head, probably because I’m having them with myself and think I’m right. If you happen to have one of these discussions, and you leave feeling like you exhaled a tiny bit, you did something right. Warning: leaving the discussion in the middle by slamming a door or exiting a room will lead to a much longer discussion that will become an argument.
Being on social media will almost always make me feel slightly worse about myself, and I will continue to do it anyway and pretend it’s because I “find good recipes there” and “follow my favorite authors”.
One day you are holding your grandma’s ashes, the next you are sitting in the ER with a scratched cornea. This is the cruel and deeply confusing emotional whiplash that is life. I do not understand it and I think I never will. Our parents pretend to understand it for our sake. Seeing them unravel in the face of life’s chaos will always be one of the hardest things.
You will continue to stand in front of the mirror for too long and your eyes will travel to the parts of you that you hate most. You will stand sideways and bend over, suck in, suck out, indulging your mind in this intense surveillance of a body that naturally expands and shrinks with time. It is exhausting. Some years the watching is quieter, others it screams, demanding attention. High waisted pants and flipping the mirror provide mild relief. Old pictures and social media do not (See #3).
Spending your twenties in a city where the noise never stops makes it hard to think, but leads to a more exciting life. Watching someone cry on the subway (or crying on the subway) makes me feel like I’m in a movie. Going to sleep to the sound of sirens makes me feel less alone.
It is okay to be (a little) vain and care about (some) superficial things. It feels less okay to pretend that you are not vain and do not care about superficial things. Caring about how you look when you leave the house, for example, is probably a good thing.
Reading books that people tell you you need to read because they are classics will not always make you smarter or more interesting. It will help you marginally every few weeks or so when playing Connections.
Adding leeks to any meal immediately makes you more sophisticated, but it also just elevates the meal, and when someone asks you for the recipe you get to say “I just threw in some leeks”.
I hate to say it, but mom was probably right.