Reflections in the New Year
Time, you youth-hungry bastard, lose my address
My old coworker who grew up in Mexico City once pointed out that Coming of Age media was so specifically and disgustingly American that it was the first time I ever had to reckon with the cold hard truth of what assimilation actually meant and how long I’d been doing it. I think there’s like a certain promise that comes with the idea. Like ok you’re in stand-still but you’ll endure some growing pains and eventually be awarded the metamorphosis into being cool and dare I say hot (whatever that means).
The problem with spending a good portion of your life thinking you’re too ugly and stupid and uncool to ever be happy is one day you realize that those things have very little to do with it. You realize many ugly (lol) and uncool and stupid people find happiness and contentment; you’re not even one of them. And then you’re left with the kind of sobering realization that it was something else all along. I turn 29 this year and the internet tells me that somehow this is both obscenely geriatric and also impossibly young. I don’t really know what to make of it. So far, media has led me to believe that I should have a couple of things to show for this milestone of life, the penultimate scene in the erotic (joking) thriller that was my early adulthood. It’s no surprise I feel like I come up empty.
To be fair, coming of age in the media landscape in which I did certainly did not lend to clarity. Every contemporary piece of fiction between 2011 and 2019 was about a woman getting the pH of her basement radically altered by a 31-year-old graphic designer commitmentphobe or a Marvel movie. And still my old friends, escapism and whimsy, flourished in this brave new world. Everything, to me, is a plot device. A bit. A smoking gun. And now that I feel like I have all these loose pieces—somehow even a youth not wasted— I have to wonder, how do they come together? I saw a TikTok (RIP or so I’m hearing) the other day that was a text post on a picture of a snowy bench that said “you have not yet met all the people you are going to love in your whole life” which gave me pause. Probably the author and audience of that post are fourteen years old, but it made me consider how true that was for me and how much time I had left until it wasn’t at all. I spend so much time dreading the future, I forget to give space to how curious I am. For a self-ascribed control freak, nothing has ever worked out how I imagined it to. Sometimes it’s better; sometimes it’s worse. But the specter of disappointment seems to always be hanging around. I watched Little Women on Christmas Eve and was visited again by this haunting scene of Florence Pugh, paper in hand:
I guess the question remains, how do you know when the time to be great is over? And when it is, how do you know what you’re supposed to be doing next?
Xx
BLONDEMEZZ IS CURRENTLY LISTENING TO
» Margaret by Lana Del Rey
» The Last High by The Dandy Warhols
» Vampire Empire by Big Thief