I’m too old to feel this young

I’m bad at imagining the future. I freeze anytime someone asks me for a five-year plan. I don’t know what I want. I just want to be happy. All the time. Here and now.

I thought maybe I found a dream apartment this weekend. A place with light and color. With windows where I could work on bonsai-ing my lemon tree. Where my friends could come hang out. I don’t think that place is going to work out. But I am thinking more and more about needing space of my own. It’s been making me cry.

I’ve been living with my family forever now. It started because I had no money. It’s not about that anymore. A friend once said, “I love that your parents are your roommates.” And I do too. It’s been a joy to be an adult with my family. To have home be a place with wriggling dogs and a yard I can dig in and people who will always love me.

I lived 1000 miles from my family for a while. And it was fine. I was happy then too. But it has also felt very right to be home in my 20s. Especially in a pandemic that makes life feel precarious. Especially now when we’re all getting old.

It’s a weird thing to feel weird about, the thought of moving out (again) at almost-30. I wonder sometimes what’s wrong with me because living at home doesn’t feel wrong. What’s wrong with me that the thought of living a 30 minute drive from the house I grew up in makes me sad? Everyone else I know “could never do it.”

I used to want a big life. Live in a city. Have everyone know my name. I haven’t wanted that in a while. But I still am constantly poking at the pieces of myself to figure out if a meaningful life can be small. Wondering if I’m failing every time someone gets married or has a kid or gets a promotion. Even though I’m happy.

I’m “too old” by my peers’ standards to be living at my parent’s home. Way too old to be enjoying it. But I think maybe it’s been good for me to live slower than everyone else. I’m obsessed with time. How it’s faster on a mountaintop than it is at the beach. I live on sea-level time, and that’s fine.

Living at home has given me the space and time to build a career that I love, that feels right, that feels healthy, and that provides for me. Not worrying about money has let me say no to bad fits and bad people. Has let me expand my creative pursuits (thanks for letting me take over the whole basement with paint and paper, mom & dad). And has let me connect with the land that I grew up on.

It’s been a gift I can never repay. Which maybe is the hardest part of thinking about leaving. Because the thing that has made living at home the easiest is knowing that my family likes it when I’m around. And the thing that makes thinking about leaving the hardest is knowing my family likes it when I’m around. I like being around them too.

I don’t know what the future for me looks like. I barely know what tomorrow does. The space I live in professionally is all about the future. How it could be great. How it could be terrible. I think maybe that’s why I avoid thinking about it in my personal life. Too many giant global-level unknowns to make any kind of plan.

All the while time is racing. The white fur on my parent’s not-so-baby-anymore dog’s face. My friends’ infants suddenly transformed into toddlers — running around and talking in full sentences. The maple tree old enough to tap.

I’ve spent most of the last couple years thrilled to leave my 20s behind. Maybe I’m just getting scared now that the new decade is months away. And how the thing that seems most certain about the future is that the one thing I want, I’ll never get. I’ll never get to be happy all the time. There will be forgotten years. There will be tears and anxiety attacks. There will be insomnia and sickness. There will be death.

I don’t know that I like this gig, this being human. I think I’d like to be an oak tree. Live so long and so slow my branches turn in on themselves and back out again. Feed my family through the fungi that envelope my roots. But I don’t get to do that either.

I haven’t been writing a lot lately because I haven’t known how to tie anything up at the end. How to pull together all the lessons into a neat little bow. I decided that’s not a good reason to stop writing. I’m trying to decide that being sad sometimes isn’t a good reason to stop living in new ways.

I guess I’m trying to grow up. I guess I want to stay soft. I guess the only certainty is impermanence. And the chance to start again. I guess there is always love. I will always try to lead with love.