There’s this particular silence in your mid-20s. As if in the the darkness of your mind you decided to stop shouting.
We settle. Wherever we are we bend. We stoop low. Faces to screens, bodies to chairs, hands to wheels. We drive. Miles and miles away from home.
You see all your X’s with new X’s. You write messages to them that you never send. Nobody hits send.
It gets harder to notice anything different. You try to run. Outside and inside you’re moving. Take trips to taste, smell, touch, feel new people, places, things. You begin to realize what running actually means so you stop.
Maybe you find new hobbies, maybe you don’t. Maybe you stop the things you did as a kid, maybe you pick them up again. Maybe you discover that just because things are expensive, it does not mean they are better. Losing your childhood is expensive.
After the fifth time of having negative numbers in your bank account, you make it a point to not having to struggle to survive. After the fifth wedding, you make it a point to buy nicer clothes. The women in your life no longer shop for you.
You get to finally pick your own style, settle in to yourself. You have favorite things, opinions to express. You talk about things with the expertise of a quarter century. Experience becomes more important now that you have it.
You try to experience as much as possible. You think about death more. You do taxes for the first time. You pay your own hospital bills. You realize how much your parents took care of you. You start to take care of them.
All-nighters are no longer routine. Parties are smaller affairs of friends. You bring your own alcohol. You buy the expensive shit that tastes delicious. The only times you get plastered are for therapy or self-punishment. You’ve learned your limits.
There are things you believe you can’t do. Ignore that. There are things you believe you can do. Do more. Build routines and break them. Form good bad habits and bad good habits and good bad relationships and bad good relationships. Our limits change. You’re still changing even though everything feels slower.
Waking up is always hard. Going to bed is harder. Each day becomes another day which becomes another year. Life moves faster. Pay attention.
Friends start disappearing. The place you live feels like your entire world. We become okay with being alone, with traveling alone.
Sometimes, on a particularly existential day, you reach deep within yourself and write something or draw something or talk to someone. These moments become fewer and fewer.
We get pets to show we can take care of more than ourselves. We stop killing plants. We throw ourselves into work.
So stop for a second and breathe. Look around you. Do something ridiculous. Break out of the routine. It’s so easy to be ordinary. It’s so simple to never speak.
Light a couch on fire. Play real life fruit ninja. Go on a road trip. Do the things you’ve always wanted to do because now you can. You always could.
Every birthday after 21 you stop counting. Next year doesn’t matter. It’s only here and now. This moment. The infinite spaces between the seconds in which you have all the time in the world. The bounty of the unknown and the comfort of the dark.
Go venture forth. Just pick a direction.
