Bittersweet 25

I’ve been 25 years old for 8 months now, and I’m not really enjoying it.

I’m kind of suffering with what’s called gerascophobia — meaning the fear of getting old (just the fact that there is a name for it scares the shit out of me even more). But it’s how it is and a quick google research showed me that I wasn’t the only lost millennial who’s struggling with the idea that every passing day not lived at its full potential is a fucking waste of time. And as millennials, we aren’t able to be satisfied with our own shit because this capitalist performance-optimization-based society fucked our sense of self-appreciation — you can imagine how much we are freaking out about time passing and under-achieving our whole life. And on my 25th birthday, this hit me real hard.

I had really feared this fatality-like number of 25 years old, that inevitably was going to fall on me, without me being able to do anything about it. I counted the days until my birthday with nausea. When the 19th of December 2019 arrived, I cried. In the end, I know it was just an arbitrary date, but when I woke up I felt like a part of me had left. That little voice that used to reassure me by saying “don’t worry, you still have time” was gone. I’d have to run after time now. And for the last 8 months, I indeed have been living in a state of emergency. And I am fucking terrified that this feeling will never disappear. That I’ll never be able to go to bed and close my eyes again without making a list of everything I didn’t achieve to do.

25 years is a quarter of a century. I hate this kind of calculation, but it doesn’t make it any less true. I hate it because it scares me so much. Technically, I have less than 3 quarters of century left to live. How am I supposed to be ok with that? How can you, at 25 years old, tell yourself that the next years to come still hold great things to live for you in store when you’re deadass convinced that you’ve already kind of failed at life? And when I say ‘failed’, I know for a fact that socially and conventionally speaking, that is not the case for me. I am extremely privileged, and I know it. I also know that it is these social and economic privileges that allow me to consider my life right now — despite of the situation I am in (I have a faculty degree, a job, a flat, a health insurance…) — as a kind of failing ship. But as much as I tried to rationalize this feeling these last months, it only lingers and continues to grow.

I think that this notion of failure, or the fear of it, is really what motivates my panic about getting old. I was raised in a household where I had to prove that I had value for the world around me, and I was constantly trying to increase this value. I had to prove it to deserve stuffs — love and affection were among these “stuffs”. I think that my parents never quite understood that children could and should be loved even if they weren’t “at their best” (I mean, children shouldn’t have to actively or passively do something to be loved, right?). Nowadays, I kind of (do I really?) understand why: they had to work extremely hard to get everything they built, including our family, and that’s why it was natural for them to reproduce this meritocratic pattern in my education. It doesn’t excuse the fact that now, I have to live with multiple neurosis (and I use this word in a really non-funny and non-ironical way). But I’m not that resentful anymore — I think. Long story short, I’ve been raised with this idea of never being enough and I’m now kind of paying the price. And as the years go by, I’m realising that all the dreams and plans I’d make for myself are probably never going to come true. One day after another, they’re more or less slowly drifting away and I can’t do shit to stop that, because, well, I can’t stop time. I would if I could.

I wish I could think differently. I wish I would be optimistic about it and be able to see that I’m still young and I still can accomplish quite a few things that would make me proud and quite contented with myself. But everything — absolutely everything in my life right now — reminds me that I have reached a point where the dreams I had — if they have not already come true — will probably never come true and that it’s too late. I mean I already had to ask myself if I wanted children, if I wanted to get married, etc. I already had to act upon it. These kind of questions don’t pop up in your life if you’ve still got the time to figure out what the fuck you want to become. They come when you already know what life is going to be. This time, I managed to buy myself a little time — a respite kind of like — but at what cost? I know these life-changing questions are going to pop up in my head or in my life, or worst both, again soon.

That’s why I seriously ask myself: how is it possible to hope for something better for the times to come, if I know deep down inside that everything I’ve dreamed of is unlikely to happen and that I’ll always have less and less time to think about myself and to figure my shit out? How can you go forward and not live in a perpetual feeling of resentment towards yourself and life in general? How could I somehow detach myself from this achievement imperative and this urgency anchored in me and be able to say to myself that every day that passes is more of an opportunity than a probable waste of time?

These are probably the questions that will stay with me in this next quarter of century and why I am going to spend all my salary — from a job that I will probably hate — in therapy sessions. And yeah, and in case you hadn’t understood already, I turned 25 years old. 8 months ago.

Photo by Matthew Henry from Burst