I’m getting older, and that’s okay
Time has been on my mind today. I’ve looked at clocks, schedules, calendars, timelines, and even an article about Facebook naming a new kind of nano-sized second. I was doing some very serious research on a Marvel comic hero, which, it makes me happy to say, was 100% work-related. The timeline of this character’s origin and subsequent appearances stretched back just a bit past my birthday — the main one, my origin date.
On a different birthday, still mine just later, I jumped out of a plane. It’s the only time I’ve ever done it, and I have to say that it was a memorable experience. The thing about it was that, as far as acrophobia goes, I’ve been more scared of heights than I was while literally plummeting towards the Earth. I’m a climber, a sport that itself deforms one’s perception of time, condensing hours into what feels like minutes and stretching seconds into lifetimes, and it’s taken me to the top of some pretty tall rocks. When looking down the face of even one of just a few hundred feet, the features give points of reference that really accentuate every inch of the distance it’s possible to fall in a way that air simply doesn’t. During my parachuted plummet, I couldn’t wrap my mind around the distance I was falling. Cars and buildings just looked tiny and fake. The experience was abstract in the same way that a thousand feet of granite isn’t. This is how it felt to look at said hero’s timeline.
The dates, the decades, were dizzying. My first reaction was, essentially, ‘ugh.’ But I’ve been doing a lot of ‘me’ work and going to therapy and such, and it seems to be working because I didn’t just stop at feeling old. Sitting here in a university library watching the bustling youngsters move between classes outside, it would have been easy to stop there, to let my focus soften, catch my 34-year-old face’s wrinkles and creases in my reflection, and take away bitterness.
Instead, I looked at the section labelled 1980s and flipped through the earliest memories of my formative years. Playgrounds, paper airplanes, my first girlfriend, who was named Julia and I thought looked liked Miss Piggy (yes, the Muppet) in a way that had me smitten as her Kermit. I remembered the time another girl grabbed me by the lapels, pinned me up against the wall, and smashed her lips against mine, saying “I like boys in jean jackets” before leaving me struck dumb one day at recess. Watching the fall of the Berlin Wall on a television with VHF and UHF dials, POGs, fanny packs, slap bracelets, Hypercolor t-shirts, the parachute pants my mom sewed herself because she refused to pay the ridiculous price Mervyn’s was asking, the mullet that went down to my shoulders, board shorts, floppy disks, dial up modems, senior prom, the day in college I chose to wear a sweater vest without a shirt underneath and was sleeveless and self-conscious about the decision all day long — like ledges and jutting buttresses adorning the towering mountain of my life, these memories and many more that continue to reveal themselves as I type provide grandeur.
I’m so grateful for these memories, this rich personal history. Far from feeling old and tired, I’m excited to see what comes next, to look back at defining moments with added perspective. Almost exactly six months ago, I broke. I felt terminally pessimistic, damned to remain angry, wracked by depression and anxiety, unfixable. It got worse before it got better, but through tears and rage, doubt and self-hatred, difficult decisions and harder conversations — even through a day I got far too close to taking my own life three separate times — it has gotten better.
All things pass, and good moods are no exception. How will I feel about today in ten years? Will this period of tumult be a turning point? A harbinger? A place I come back to in meditation to give the me in memories a big hug? Time will tell.
