Decadence

Warning: mention of suicide.

(decade + cadence, because I’m a nerd)

This feels weird. The 2010s is the decade in which I became an adult. There is so much that I have been that I will never be again. Does everyone experience this? I think so, in some way.

I’ve just spent several hours talking about Life And Other Fun Things with one of my friends. I am constantly overwhelmed by how much there is in the world and how much knowledge it is possible for me to absorb and how little of it I have absorbed and how much there is for me to Do and how much of it is impossible for me to do alone. I am scared that I will do something without realising what I have done and it will ruin something else that was a good thing. I am apprehensive that in trying not to become my parents I am becoming them and/or that I am simply becoming their opposite without thinking through all the consequences. I am frustrated with my need to be in control of things that I physically cannot control.

And I find joy, or maybe joy finds me. Joy in my houseplant that I left for a week when I went home for Christmas/my dad’s birthday and that didn’t die. Joy in putting the chorus of “Oops I Did It Again” and “Baby One More Time” together, singing one and playing the other on my cello. Joy in Bee Movie and the fact that said friend inexplicably unironically loves it. Joy in gentle flirtation, in conversation that makes my brain hurt, in slowly getting better at communication, in hugs and touches and time and losing track of time and gratitude and all the people in my life who care about me and who want me to be at peace. Joy in myself because I am 23 years old and three years ago I wanted to be dead last summer and I am here, alive.

Words. The title of this blog was originally “Words Are Hard” and that is still how I feel almost two years later. Sometimes words don’t help. Sometimes words are the only thing that can help and they are also simultaneously the thing that will help least. The more time I spend alive the more I realise how futile it is to try to be perfect and unchanging. We can’t help but change. It’s in our nature.

In that I have a New Year’s resolution (which is to say that I have recently made a resolution and the timing coincides with the end of the Gregorian year 2019), it is to stop being envious of things that I assume that other people have (that I don’t have) and to channel that envy into intense appreciation for the things I have. For example, I am typing this on my computer keyboard in the dark and the keyboard is not backlit and I’ve only made about 10 typos this entire post. I appreciate this about myself, and it doesn’t make up for not having any friends who have known me since before I was legally an adult, but it’s something.

Happy New Queer, folks. Let’s be kinder to ourselves and to others in the next decade.