Fumbling Towards 38
November 1: What Have I Become.

In this 10-part essay series, I’ll be detailing how fabulously I’ve blown it on all expectational fronts of adulthood as I approach my 38th year of #lyfe on November 10th, 2019. On that day, I will easily be the oldest I’ve ever been. That is, if you don’t count the day after my older sister turned 21 and I — an insolent 18-year-old bad-girl — borrowed her student ID and social security card, walked into the DMV, lied about losing my drivers license and got an Oregon State-issued identification card, complete with my image and my sister’s birthday. I used that little golden ticket to buy booze and get into clubs with my older friends until I was actually 21 in 2002. On that day, the day I boldly strode into the Express DMV at the Valley River Shopping Center in Eugene, Oregon and slammed down my sister’s identity, coercing that suspicious adult to do my illegal bidding, that I was the oldest I’ve ever been.
I have a real problem “living in the moment,” whatever that means. People who meditate or do yoga love to tell others to “just be with yourself…today…as you are.” But who I am today is simply an amalgamation of past decisions, risks and humiliations. With every passing year that I live, old traumas become unveiled and childhood memories flit away like the swirling plastic bag in American Beauty, destined to one day choke an endangered turtle to death like my grandfather always warned. It’s very hard for me to isolate who I am now without dipping into a past of watching VH1 when all my friends were watching MTV. I’m going to try. For a few days. For 10 days to be exact. I’m going to try to define myself for myself. I’m going to try to *eyeroll* be with myself as I am today. I’ll synthesize my experiences little by little to attempt to recognize what the hell I have become.
I don’t want to make any grand statements about aging in this series because quite honestly, none of it makes sense to me. White culture believes that aging is the most offensive human act second to getting fat, but Lakota people very much love and revere our elderly, so it’s all very confusing. The numbers of it don’t make sense either. I think that’s why I’m drawn to writing about 38. It means nothing. It has no significance. It’s just another calendar year. I remember 8 being a pretty great year by all accounts. I mean it was 1989, Disney’s The Little Mermaid drove me into some iconic body shame and Cher released “If I Could Turn Back Time.” What more is there to say? At 18, I was a lowkey criminal with a full-blown weed addiction who got a full ride academic and diversity-building scholarship to college. I barely remember 28 because I was teaching adolescents at a severely underfunded middle school which is apparently so traumatic, your brain wipes your memory of it completely clean like you’ve been in a head-on collision with a semi. All I know about 38 is that I’m glancing back at my much cooler, younger self like Elizabeth Perkins at the end of the movie Big. You know, when her boyfriend Tom Hanks turns back into Josh, an actual child and she’s sort of weeping from her car watching him walk into his mom’s house. I’m looking back at myself like she’s looking at Josh, at once thinking, “Goodbye youthfulness. You were so much fun,” and, “Holy shit, he’s 12 years old?! I’m a fucking monster!” This is all to say that when I look back at younger Jana, wearing an adult-sized suit and more eyeliner than Jack fucking Sparrow, I am both mortified at her behavior and OB.SESSED.
I am what I’m hereby coining a “top-tier millennial.” I’m the oldest a millennial is allowed to be. Born in 1981, I’m Millennial with a GenX cusp; a Native and European mutt braised in a rich sauce of Oregonian seasonal affective disorder. My shows growing up were a cartoon called Animaniacs, a live action sitcom called Dinosaurs, Full House and, if my school bus got me home in time, Days of Our Lives when Sam had an eating disorder and Marlena was possessed by the devil. Because I was the middle child, I was able to easily position myself as the outsider. Not the original or the baby, I could seamlessly slip through the cracks of our back porch and smoke hand-rolled cigarettes made of bible paper and sometimes tea if nothing else was on hand. I came of age during the dawn of in-home internet when dial-up jammed our only phone line so that I could connect to chat room perverts across the world wide web. This was a dangerous and fun thing because I was simultaneously becoming “one of the guys” in my social group — a blessing for them, quite honestly, and a curse for me, a horny hetero with boobs that were cool-big for about week in sixth grade before they became too-big for the rest of my life.

I lived a very romantic inner-life as a child, adolescent and teen but I was quite depressed throughout. Scribbled into the first diary that I owned in the fourth grade, I can be quoted writing about how “everyone in my life hates me,” which was painfully untrue. When Jessie Spano acquired that iconic speed addiction in Saved By the Bell, I really related, not to the speed part but to the part about needing to succeed at all costs. My older sister was gorgeous, thin, an incredible musician, an accomplished thinker and academic, had cool friends, and, as I’ve come to learn, was also Jessie Spano’ing out at all times. Although I tried them, I never took to amphetamines. My addiction was comparing myself to others. First, it was my sister and then it became other thin, beautiful women that seemed to get things. I wasn’t interpreting this feeling as a systemic injustice at that time. Was Jessie Spano? No! Jessie was getting high on the unrealistic expectations of being a woman and because my generation wasn’t afforded the language behind that bullshit, I internalized it allllllll.
As a young teen, I thought about suicide more times than I can honestly remember. But tbh, I didn’t even take that seriously. I assumed simultaneously that every girl wanted to die and also that no one understood what I was going through. I was a bitchy depressive. Unlike a more authentic case of suicidal ideation, I wasn’t as concerned with alleviating my extraordinary sadness as much as I was with haunting my own funeral so that I could hear my friends and family eulogize me. Can you believe that? What a fuckin’ asshole.
What’s wild is that I still have all of those ridiculous feelings! The comparison, the neediness, the attention-seeking, the hunt for validation, the excitement of meeting strangers online, the Jessie Spano meltdown — all of that is still a part of who I am at 38. By all accounts, I haven’t matured at all! I’m still a very rebellious and depressive adolescent except more so thanks to years of education and life experiences that have exposed me to the knowledge that a lot of the shit I was and am going through is actually a direct result of greater systemic injustices. All these years I’ve been Spano’ing silently and not a single cultural message has grabbed me by the shoulders like Zach Morris did and said:
“Hey. Here’s the truth. Fatness is totally chill and super common. White people hate Native people because your existence threatens their access to wealth so that’s why you’ve been made to feel invisible. For the same greedy reasons, the majority of men inherently dislike women so consider avoiding rom-coms, binary gender norms and even dating. Nobody can ‘have it all,’ especially women. Especially Black and brown women. What you’re dealing with is called chronic depression and anxiety, people-pleasing runs in the family and will always be amplified by the extraordinary need you’ll see around you. There are meds for that. Oh, and here. Look at this detailed map of your future sprinting through a muddy opportunity gap, dodging sexism and army-crawling under razor wire of weight stigma only to arrive at a 20 foot tall, wooden wage barrier that’s pretty much impenetrable if you don’t have the upper body strength. On your back, you’ll be carrying the heavy burden of a genocidal history and while you come from a family of survivors, your own people might be the very ones to turn their backs on you. Okay! Remember: money is the root of evil, beauty standards are a close second and your only saving grace will be art, which you’ll always spend more money on than you’ll make. Go get em, champ!”
Here I am, 10 days away from 38 and this is what I’ve become after only recently learning the whole truth about what I’m up against. I’m a fat, single, broke, unemployed, depressed Native writer and artist who desperately wants to hear what you’ll say about me at my funeral when I die. Is writing this essay series completely self-absorbed? Yes. Will I struggle between self-deprecating humor and actually being proud of myself? Absolutely. It’s the game I’ve been playing since I was a young woman.
“I’m so excited…I’m so excited…I’m so…scared.”
-Jessie Spano
