Meditations on Turning (Twenty) Eight
As I write this, today is the last day I will ever be twenty-seven.
(I share my birthday with the cities of Rome and Bangkok, with Iggy Pop, and with Robert Smith of the Cure. I’m in good company.)
I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I am glad to be rid of this year of my life. Twenty-seven is known as the “cursed” year of a person’s twenties. Of course, many famous people have died at that young age. To know I am about to turn twenty-eight is know that I have experienced a greater span of time than the man who wrote “Are You Experienced?“, which is quite a thing to contemplate.
On the other hand, the bell tolls for my twenties. I still have two years left, yet, two full rotations around the Sun, but that decade of my life is now entering its winter.
I am not one of those twentysomethings who regards entering my thirties with a sense of horror and apprehension, as if the second I turn thirty I will immediately become middle-aged. In many ways I am excited by the prospect. But it is worrisome. I am now in the final years of my twenties.
At the start of this decade of my life, I was living in student halls. I distinctly remember the morning after my twentieth birthday, laying in bed and staring at the ceiling. I felt so unaccomplished. I was twenty and I hadn’t done anything.
Looking back, now, I can see I was being stupid. Unless you’re Millie Bobby Brown, nobody has done anything by twenty. Most people known for doing anything are well into their forties. Not that I believe a person should look at the stories of a few lucky celebrities, like Samuel L. Jackson, to validate their own accomplishments, or lack thereof. Your life is your own, and you can do whatever whenever.
Right now, though I feel perhaps unavoidably uneasy about being in the waning years of my twenties, I am happy with what I’ve achieved so far. At twenty-two, I wrote my first novel, and just before twenty-three, I started writing Rollerskater, which became perhaps my best-known work thus far.
At age twenty-six, I finished Rollerskater, and took a “fallow year” between 2023 and 2024. That turned out to be a good idea, because twenty-seven turned out to be one of the most emotionally tumultuous years of my life.
On turning twenty-eight, I’m mostly looking forward to the future. I often use the expression “Remember Lot’s wife”, borrowed from “Natural’s Not In It” by Gang of Four. I try not to dwell in the past. Time’s arrow moves only forwards, entropy cannot be stopped. It is what it is.
Conversely, it is important not to speculate too hard on the future, to try to forecast the unforeseeable. All that exists is what is happening now. This text I am writing is capturing a moment in time, a slice in the timeline of my life. I know not where that line ends. But it hasn’t ended yet.
I don’t think I’ll miss being twenty-seven. This was a year of treading water. Now I am trying once again to swim against the tide of time. I have several projects on the go right now that I’d like to see through to the finish. I don’t think I’ve drained the well of ideas just yet.
But no matter what happens, I am grateful to be alive. I am grateful to have had the good fortune to exist at all. The odds of coming into being are finite, but so astronomically unlikely that it boggles the mind. Every year I am amazed all over again that my body is composed of materials that would not exist if not for the death throes of ancient stars.
Yes, age is just a number. I know this. I’m a spring baby. When New Year comes, I start referring to myself by my next age anyway.
I work hard. Every year I get a little less stupid. At least I hope I do. Every year I figure something else out. I often feel like life is like very slowly chipping away plaster that covers some vast fresco. But you can only do it a little bit at a time, or you’ll damage the whole thing.
So, here’s to twenty-eight. And to two more years of being in my twenties. I hope that when my thirties come, as they inevitably will, that I will be ready for them.
Illustration by PhotoMIX Company.