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Some thoughts about turning thirty:
I spent my whole life until now preparing my self. The first twenty years within the guidance of family and education, the following ten years with little guidance at all, just absolutely winging it. And I have always been very neurotic about this, constantly self-conscious of what I am attempting to build, what I am failing to build, and in rare, breathtaking moments of triumph, what I have begun to build for myself.
Which isn’t to say I never had fun. But the fun was also preparative, and so were all the risks and messes, because I was never just preparing myself for a good job or a fat paycheck. I was preparing myself for a life that would be good, that would be full of romance and adventure and fame but also stability and elegance and respect. And perhaps a large part of my neurosis over the matter stemmed from wanting everything for myself, which meant avoiding the morbid narrowness of a clear intention. No, my preparation was instead guided by an amorphous sense of integrity to what feels good, what I’m good at, and what I believe is good— this is what I mean by winging it, and I do think that’s better than no integrity at all.
I spent so long preparing, one goalpost replaced by another, that I was shocked to feel, for the first time, like I was done preparing, that the foundations have been laid, like ‘em or not, and this is it. This is my life.
“My twenties were so scary” is something a lot of people said to me as I turned thirty, prompted to reflect on their own aging in decennial terms. My friends have always been older than me, and I have always watched them studiously, gleaning hints and warnings of what was to come. In this sense, I have been anticipating thirty since I was twenty, when a classmate first taught me how to roll joints at her apartment in Bed-Stuy. “I’m thirty!” she would exclaim, in a way that seemed to mean “I’m too old for this shit,” and although I didn’t want to be too old for anything yet, I longed to complain that I was.
Strangely, I do feel less scared.
Was I scared of thirty? Sure I was. A bunch of ships, however silly and superficial, have sailed. The nice thing about your twenties is you get to be part of culture’s temporal center, the market demographic endowed with authority over what is cool, current, and cutting edge. Granted, I have always felt just barely behind on trends and scenes, like I was bad at being a young person.
But what I really loved about my twenties was that you get to be mature for your age, smart for your age, good at sex for your age. You get to be precocious, which I have always loved to be, and perhaps this was what scared me most of all, realizing I identified so strongly with that line of praise. I would be losing that part of my identity, and the bar would rise for what made a person impressive.
There’s this gay historical dimension to it, of course. The life expectancy of a sexually active gay man was horrifically low for close to twenty years. Even before the AIDS crisis, gay men fretted and fussed over losing their youth, especially if they hadn’t managed to find a committed man to accompany them into old queendom. You could also be killed while trying to get laid, or kill yourself from not getting laid. But that’s what’s so distinctive about my generation of gay men, that we are the children of Obergefell and Truvada, sparkling with optimism in growing old (with a partner.)
I always had a very limited view of the future, in spite of that generational privilege. At best, I just couldn’t see it. I would try to envision myself at thirty, and there was a terrifying blank space. At worst, I felt certain I would die by then. Since my childhood, I had this grim conviction that my death would be very dramatic, sudden and early. I would later think of this as a kind of passive suicidality, an indifference to living. While this should have probably made everything seem rather pointless, it instead made me feel especially anxious about what I will have made of my certainly brief life.
But you know I didn’t die— I had crystallized.
When the clock struck midnight, I turned thirty and felt an uncanny sense of relief. It wasn’t some grand epiphany. I know I have plenty more growing and learning to do, more ways that my life will likely change. But I felt like a big deadline had passed, however arbitrary and self-imposed. And instead of seeing the next deadline come into view, I felt myself turn back and see, for perhaps the first time, the sum of my life so far. The places I have been, the names I have donned, the people I have loved. They no longer looked like a table of wins and losses, but like one cohesive shape forged by choice and experience— and I am happy with that shape.
XO
TY
yes to thirty, onwards!
Happy birthday and good look with your book!