Howdy.

How is life?

I went out to lunch under the California sun today and thought about some things. From being an adult to my hot take on seasons and aging, here they are.

GROWN UP

Eating lunch out today made me feel like the grown up version of my fifteen year old self. I used to go to this one restaurant all of the time with my best friend when we were fifteen. We used to run around the high-end mall afterwards, taking mirror selfies in the bathroom of Bloomingdales and eating cherry chocolates from See’s. We were so young and so naive and nothing that mattered then really seems to matter anymore. I remember that an older girl from my school worked in Nordstrom at the time, and whenever I saw her there I thought that she was so old and so cool for having a real job. I was still taking care of my neighbor’s cat for pocket cash back then. Minimum wage labor still had a mature, alluring appeal. We would use our brand new debit cards to buy bralettes and lip gloss, not even knowing which way to swipe them half of the time. But that was fifteen. We were babies. What could we do or think or say when our moms were still driving us around town? Getting lunch out always felt like a performance. It felt like out way of pretending to be adults, of pretending to be as old and sophisticated as we wished that we were. We had our mom’s old purses and our driving permits and not the slightest idea of what was to hit us in the years to come. It was, in a way, the last year of our innocence. The innocence that we threw to the wolves the first chance that we got. We dared them to devour it.

So sitting there today, as I stare down twenty-one, as I stare down the beginning of my legitimate adult life, I felt like who I was always trying to be back then. It was this strange moment of realizing that the world does not feel just beyond my fingertips anymore. It doesn’t feel like it’s behind a locked door that I am still just trying to hack with a bobby pin. It feels wide open. I don’t feel like a puppy who’s paws are too big for it’s body anymore. I can’t tell you how strange that is. Or how strange it is that I can get on a plane and fly across the country and rent an apartment and start a whole new life. Becoming an adult during the pandemic was strange for a lot of reasons, but none as strange as the total disorientation that it left me in. I was a kid when the world closed and an adult when it opened back up again, but I wasn’t sure how it happened. I think that’s why it still just feels so odd and unbelievable to be where I am now, in the place that felt so, so far away only yesterday.

A HOT TAKE ON SEASONS

In other news, I am totally craving fall. Am I the only one who yearns for the holidays in the middle of summer? Who has always had pumpkin pie instead of cake for their July birthday? Why has nothing ever sounded so lovely as pumpkins on porches and dark red leaves in the streets? Even though this is California and our pumpkins are all rotten from the heat by Halloween and the only leaves in the streets are fallen palm fronds. If you don’t know, October is the hottest month in San Diego. It’s tragic. We crank our air conditioners, light woodsy candles, and pretend that the Santa Ana wind blowing through the trees is actually a crisp, cool breeze. It’s insanity. And yeah, we have some of the best year-round weather on the face of the planet, but I have some words about that too.

It’s not healthy, it can’t be, to go through the year as a dynamic human being in a largely static environment. I think that we need seasons in order to feel sane. People ask me all of the time about how I am going to deal with the weather in New York, and I never quite know what to say to them. I want to experience the seasons. I want to be frozen on a street corner in January and sweating on a subway car in July. I want to huddle into a cafe with a scarf and gloves in November and feel the liberation of shedding such garments by May. I think that’s beautiful.

I was talking to my neighbor a few weeks back about when she used to live in New York and she told me something sweet. She said that she was walking with a friend through the city as the weather was beginning to turn when he randomly turned to her and said I can’t wait to experience the seasons with you. That melted me. It spoke to embracing change and discomfort and relief and how the color of the sky and the feeling of the air on our skin allows us opportunities to do this everyday. I think that’s healthy. So no, I’m not worried about the cold spells in New York any more than I am worried about the cold spells of my own life. They are uncomfortable experiences that I want to find beauty in.

That’s a big thing that I have learned about life so far. People like to tell you how you should feel about things. They expect you to feel the way that everyone else feels. When I was younger, I fell into the trap of believing them. I thought that if the consensus was that college was excruciatingly stressful or that minimum wage labor jobs were soul-sucking or that you can’t know who you are when you are young, that these things must be true. I waited for them to be true. I waited to wake up one day and suddenly realize that I was wrong and that I really did agree with these things. But that has yet to happen. So far, I have found so much love and tenderness in the spaces that people taught me could only house pain. I have found so much beauty in, and grown the most from, the experiences that I was told would be ways that I never found them to be. Yes, college is stressful and minimum wage labor is grueling, but these are incomplete stories. They are half-truths told in the half-light.

SOME THOUGHTS ON AGING

Aging is another great example. We are told, perhaps more than we are told anything, that aging is awful. Dreadful. The worst. And nothing makes my blood boil more. Have you ever seen those videos on the internet where that guy goes up to older people on the street and interviews them? He asks them how old they are, what that feels like, and if they would like to be any age again. Their responses? That they feel great. That they feel better, smarter, more confident and secure, than they ever did when they were young. They acknowledge that it can be hard to age, but while also revealing that they are happier than they have ever been, that they would not want to be twenty again if you paid them.

That blew my mind, it really did. Not because I didn’t believe it, but because I did. Youth is so glamorized but so ugly at the same time. We feel pressure to be having the best time ever all of the time because everyone tells us that now is the only time for that. And it’s just not true. I want to be dancing in a field of sunflowers at eighty, not telling young people to enjoy the fleeting time that they have left before everything tips downhill. I have so many words on this. My friend and I used to rant about it all of the time to each other back when we were sixteen. Even when it was good, even when we were running bare foot to the beach in the middle of the night and sneaking off to cemeteries with crushed wildflowers in the palms of our hands, we knew that there had to be more. We knew that to be this young and this insecure in our foothold of the world was surely not everything that there would ever be.

So yes. Incomplete stories. We hear them and mistake them for everything, for truth. But they are only just a sliver. I have come to understand that. Filling in the rest, finding out what it true for you, that has become my favorite part about being alive these days. That, and lighting pumpkin candles in June.

Love, m.

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