My therapist ended our call on Thursday by saying, “the story is ongoing.”
I told her I’m always trying to present some kind of refined portrait of myself. Even in the mess or difficulties I share here and in my career, there’s some kind of narrative around it. (I do it even in therapy.) I built my job out of sharing—but only so much. I told her I want something to show from a life that’s been in metamorphosis for years and years. A lesson. A new perspective. I have those but I want to come to some sort of neat conclusion. I said to my therapist, begrudgingly, the story is ongoing because there is nothing tidy right now to present.
I’ve thought too hard about a tidy story because I turned 35 today, somehow an age that matters more to me than 30 did, or 40 will in five years, even 50. It’s a delineation. The border between youth and… not youth. I resist the word old because of how we treat any person who ages—even though aging is part of the process of being lucky enough to be alive.
I’ve spent most of this year asking all of the people in my life past this middle marker in this particular decade how this age felt to them. I got varying responses. Some said they didn’t think about it at all. Quite a few said it happened during the thick of lockdowns and pandemic life so they didn’t really feel it. Others said it was difficult, some said it was bright and beautiful. I collected all of this data in the hope I’d, too, find something about turning 35 that mattered to me. None of it helped. I asked the question to keep avoiding how I—me, not anyone else—felt about it, and how inconclusive this story is.
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For years, I have felt like this tweet I recently read, which goes something along the lines of “I’m not okay, but for the purposes of this conversation I’m fine.” I find the question “how are you?” loaded. What should I say? I smile, maybe chuckle a little and say, I’m fine, I’m here, it’s the usual, you know? Life’s hard on everyone, right?
I went to a social function a couple of weeks ago and left on the verge of a panic attack. My feet pounded against the pavement on this cool Toronto night, near running to get home. I wanted to present myself as this well-ordered version for whomever showed interest. I began to sweat and grab at my clothes. I reached for Dan’s hand, his arm, any appendage available to me, as an anchor. I felt unsteady. And yet I still smiled, asked questions of the people I knew, or those I’d met for the first time. I sipped my drink and smiled some more. Anytime a person asked how I was I diverted the conversation back to them, asking about a specific thing they mentioned earlier.
I’ve often felt insane about holding information about anyone I meet but that’s simply who I am. I ask questions, I remember. It becomes hard on me when I remember all of these facts or small details mentioned to me at parties, book launches, bars, online, in private messages, or on the street, and I know that person barely remembers who I am. But of course that happens when you don’t share all that much. It’s not so much being a Scorpio—pop astrology’s most mysterious and devious zodiac sign—but rather not wanting to be part of the conversation for a spell, or let someone in who might not respond to how I really am.
So I say I’m fine.
What I really want to say is:
Years ago, it fucked me up so much that I lost my dream job which I didn’t really find all that dreamy but difficult and political and insufferable because people only want things from you and not to know you and so I hardened a bit and then I began to work for myself on the things I said mattered to me like hot takes and interviews and doing 14 radio hits in one day about the Grammy’s and I was poor and relied on my partner and family to help me out and felt guilty and bent over backwards to make sure I held all of their troubles in return and I thought the friends I had made were going to be for my entire lifetime but of course they ended up leaving for reasons I don’t even care to understand anymore that’s just how relationships go, and during this time my partner began his years long mental health unravelling, a journey he needs to take and needs to deal with in his own way, and I became a caretaker, which I still am to this day but I don’t talk about it because he’s ashamed of it because mental health, he believes, even people I love believe, isn’t a good enough reason to feel or be this way and I deeply disagree but still I don’t talk about what it’s like and how it’s this huge part of my daily life and then, right when the Toronto Raptors won their first championship, god, one of the best days of my life, I got a job to pull me out of my poor life and I absolutely fucking loathed it, my first day of orientation made me miss the team parade, and do you know what it’s like to be part of a company that is actively run by megalomaniac nerds who believe they are doing “good work” but that doesn’t mean shit at all, just more money for them and other rich people, and I stayed there for years and years because I needed the money, what a fucked system, and I had to listen to actual bullies vying for the approval of these fucking nerds telling me I don’t know how to write, I don’t know anything about writing, and all of my ideas are stupid, and can you believe this one guy told me how to do an interview and I said can you Google me?, but that year I also got my first magazine cover story then and felt joyful for a spell and appeared in a documentary about this city’s biggest pop star and kept freelance writing until I couldn’t, and then you know what happened, the whole world shutdown and became cruel and despondent and we all changed and no one wants to fucking talk about it and now here we are crueler than before and I’m getting softer, gooey, exhausted, and I feel like an open wound that keeps getting prodded at, but then my nephew came into my life and he cracked me wide open, allowing me to feel and be in a way I’d never imagined I could, this little person who repeats everything and I never tire of hearing him ask for the one millionth time if the garbage truck is coming by, and he patiently accepts that it may not, and my heart could burst from so much love, but then I return back to me, and this dread or numbness, I don’t know what, so I’ve been keeping busy with being, but this year, oh this year, there were other plans from the universe and I got let go from the job I hated and I laughed and danced but then a week later I got evicted from the apartment I loved, the place I felt was my actual home, and it shattered me, and I was devastated from having to go anywhere else, so I let my routine go, let myself fall apart, let my body that I had worked so hard to heal from years of stress and past sexual trauma and caretaking for everyone and being this intense human fall all the way away from me, and then we moved to the east end and I started to love it here but then our ceiling began to leak and there was the flood, a stupidly apt metaphor for all of this, and that changed the dynamic here too, a building still under construction anyway because that caused the leak, and yes I get the metaphor there too, and then when I could calm down to do all of the work I was assigned as a new freelancer again, because god I can’t even think about working for someone else right now, my body started to really give out and demand rest, to cocoon from the world, so, no, I’m not really okay most of the time, I feel numb, on Lexapro, which I hate, and I’m fumbling, feeling, reaching toward a version of myself I can love and remember why I like what I like and do what I do and you know what? That’s how I am.
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I remember on my 25th birthday I had the flu but I was determined to celebrate. My friend S came to visit. E had trekked all the way from Montréal, too. Unfortunately, my roommate K was there, though I was tepid about her after she almost set our house on fire, yet still feeling obligated to have her participate in some way. I went to The Ossington, a place that became a home away from home. I danced. I drank rye and gingers while on cold meds. I wore a very tight, faux leather dress, wondering if I should invite the man who broke my heart that summer so he could see the revenge dress. I knew what I wanted, or what I was supposed to want, which was a journalism career like everyone else in my community. I wanted to write a book, talk to musicians, and be loud. I knew my direction back then, even if it didn’t work out that way.
And here I am now, thirty-five years-old, without such a precise direction. Somehow that’s a relief. I’m working on a book. I had a dream the other night that this book ought to be turned into a novel and not the essays I’m working on currently, and I wonder if that’s possible. I freelance for places and people I like, surviving, hoping to keep this up because I enjoy this flexible schedule. I meditate every morning, with the window open to the cold wind. I sip cinnamon tea before coffee so I can heal my inflamed body. I go to markets and pick my produce. I FaceTime my nephew often, speaking in a secret language we’re developing. I go to pottery class, search for floral arranging classes, and read books by women I wish I had discovered years ago. I make the meals I was too afraid of before. I love Dan, perhaps too hard and too much, and look at all we’ve overcome, grieving what we’ve lost, mourning what could have been, and yet still having faith and some sense of surprise in where we’re going, in spite of it all. I’m going to France in April and Italy, too, so I search hotel and flight prices. I’m thinking about which language apps to use, if I should use them at all, because I will not be afraid, and I will speak French, and very poor Italian, and I will smile and say I tried, and really believe myself. I will no longer be afraid of the things that have so long lingered like stones in my belly, like buzzing wasps in my brain. Isn’t that enough, I tell myself? I look to the moon, she tells me it’s enough. I decide everything I am doing now is enough.
When my therapist said the story is ongoing I wondered what it would be like to live that way. To, I don’t know, spill my guts to you all about how I really, really am and not mince words, or make the narrative pretty and thoughtful, but messy and joyful and non-linear. There’s always a story to tell. Some meaning to pull from what happens in life. Why not just let the story unfold?
I love writing, I love being a writer—I often forget that when I’m obligated to take care of the people around me, to perform, and be something different to each person in my life.
I do a lot of that obligation, for what it’s worth, and avoid what I really need to focus on, which is all of the mess and the work that needs to be done for me, not for anyone else. See, I just want to be needed. I think we all want that. I developed an entire personality and spirit out of that from the adults in my once young life being who they were. If I’m not needed, I leave. Ask all of the friendships I’ve lost because of that. Ask my partner, who has been on the receiving end of me begging him once a year to break up with me if I’m no longer the person he actually needs in this life. I once told him that I was preparing him for someone else. That this relationship would be the thing that gets him to the person he’s truly meant to be with for the rest of his life. That sounded like a better story to me.
What I want from 35, from these next years, even for the next decade, is what Mary Oliver wrote: just to be alive / on this fresh morning / in this broken world.
If the story is ongoing, not neat, not tidy, not a performance, what is it that’s happening? I suppose I’ll find out.
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