I’m Finding Myself Again
Thoughts from a regressive 32-year-old, about pivotal life moments and more…
At no other point in my adult life have I identified with my teenage self more than I do at this moment.
I am a 32-year-old woman with over a decade of life experience, post-education and several long-term ex-partners. I am earning enough money to have a semblance of something that looks like financial independence (can one ever be financially free without a large trust fund?!). Yet in my current position, I find myself feeling more and more like the girl I left behind some fifteen years ago.
Recently I have been wondering why that is? In my current situation I don’t have a mortgage, romantic partner, or a career that I feel serves me. I am also drawn into the hobbies and career interests which once filled my life as a teenager and push away those I have spent the last decade building.
17-year-old me spent her time researching all the local gigs. She wanted to date men who played guitars and had tattoos. She liked to take photographs, selfies, go to galleries, parties and hotbox cars.
She had no clue what she wanted to do with her life. At one point, she settle on becoming a vet, but I think that was because she never realised that was a possibility and thought “I can do that” – she didn’t but she could have.
She was also desperately headstrong and sure of her beliefs, beliefs that perhaps got compromised over the last 15 years. Even though she was young, she knew her views on children, family life, religion and she also knew it was okay not to know what you wanted or what direction life was going.
I wonder how 20-something-year-old me lost this sense of self, maybe she subconsciously rejected it in a failed attempt to “grow up” and live the so-called 9–5 dream, in the hope it would provide a sense of stability and achievement.
I say I wonder. it’s like I don’t know that is what did happen.
My twenties were over all too soon with the rude interruption of COVID! It feels that I should have only just turned 30 rather than a way more unflattering 32!
Post-university was a flurry of people ditching their artsy dreams in favour of a steady paycheque and parental approval. In my network, friends would exclaim that they just landed their dream job! It would turn out, this so-called dream job, would be at an insurer or an engineering firm. The dream being well paid, stable and not boring enough to justify trying to fund a writing career with temporary bar work.
I was one of these people.
Nights out also took a turn, from house parties and underground clubs to nice dinners and drinks in sterile city establishments. All very nice, very sensible and very predictable. I am aware that other people had much more vibrant and chaotic 20s than what I described, but these are my musings after all. That’s also not to say there were no heady nights out and moments of debauchery, I lived in London, and it was impossible to avoid!
In contrast, I have an almost romantic memory of my late teenage years (post 16, no one wants to remember being a 13-year-old girl at a girl’s school!). The teenage years were where networking consisted of befriending classmates who were allowed to go to the park or local youth club at the weekend, or whose older brother didn’t mind buying booze from the local offie.
A time when the most notable achievement among peers was who had the coolest song on their MySpace profile or a hand-me-down blackberry to use the WhatsApp of the era, BBM. There was no real regard for career plans, good grades were a bonus but not a must for notability among peers. Everyone was more preoccupied with who was going to throw the next house party, who had smoked weed and whose parents were going to get them a car so they could “do lifts” on a particular night out.
Now I stare down the barrel of what could be classed as “real adulthood”. Not the practice run of my twenties.
Now the cool kids are the people who start their own businesses, who have life experience from living abroad, people who own properties or produce their own documentaries. And the people with children!
So many children!
Children separate the wheat from the chaff when adulting. Once you have children you are a real adult, the rest of us are merely pretending, running around trying to make sense of it all. Not understanding why friends with children can’t have that extra glass of wine or indeed relate to your existential crisis, as why should you have a crisis when you get a whole uninterrupted night’s sleep, every night! Yet all in amongst all these over achievers, I find myself dissatisfied in my career, living in a hackney house share and enjoying those wild, stranger-filled nights out that I should have been doing in my twenties.
Aging is a curious thing, as much as life experience shapes you, ultimately you still feel like the same person as you always have. As I mentioned before, I find myself unattached in ways that I did not envisage at 32. So, as I sit here, at what feels like a pivotal moment in my life, I feel strange.
I have described this feeling to my friends as “very 21”, but maybe “forever 17” would be more appropriate.
In short this is a piece about me feeling like I lost a part of myself over the last ten years. It didn’t happen overnight and I wasn’t miserable. But I now realise that perhaps I was giving too much of myself for a stable and traditional life.
So now I have the blessing of unexpected freedom. I vow to embrace this headstrong character, not to compromise my core beliefs and to run headfirst into life with almost the same naivete that 17-year-old me would be proud of.
So, here’s to fresh starts and being “more 17.” We should all go out to find the joy and what lights a fire in our bellies. It’s out there somewhere. But also make friends with the people who share their weed and stay out all night staring at the stars, like they don’t have to get up the next morning.
