Growing Pains
One of the stranger things about being alive is that the longer you go without dying the more people think you know what you’re talking about, particularly younger people, who have not yet figured out that you are as, and in many ways more, clueless about everything as they are, especially since you’ve got a much better idea of how it’s going to turn out but still keep doing the dumb things you’ve always done in some idiotic insistence that this time it might end up differently.
Recently a young acquaintance of mine asked for a definition of adulthood, and because I can never give a straight answer, at least not at first, I said, “When a part of your body hurts and you’re like, I guess that’s just gonna hurt from now on.” On further reflection, I allowed that it was probably “when you figure out who you are and you learn to be okay with it.” This also sounds like me not giving a straight answer but as someone who has not died for what seems like an eternity at this point, I have to say it is about as sincere as I can get.
I have not done any demographic surveys of this newsletter’s readership yet, but I have to assume that if you are someone who not only chose to receive it but has continued to so do in spite of my repeated requests, both overt and through the kind of content I have offered thus far, that you discontinue service, you live your life with a certain amount of discomfort about how your internal conception of yourself grows increasingly discordant with both the image you try to project to the outside world and the opinion you have of who you are when you’re able to block out the nagging voice inside that refuses to sugarcoat the truth. (There is also the possibility that you are someone who is completely at ease with yourself and you just enjoy observing the suffering of others, with an almost clinical detachment to their obvious pain, unless it is actually something that brings you pleasure, in which case I wish you would unsubscribe, you sick fuck.)
[This would probably be a good place to lay down a marker about “frequencies,” which is something I would like to revisit at a later date, when this newsletter becomes official and I manage to overcome my distaste for soliciting money in exchange for the asinine ranting I somehow churn into strangely spiraling sentences that leave you scrambling to figure out where exactly you lost your place as you tried to follow the thread to its seemingly elusory endpoint. In any event, premium-tier subscribers will be treated to a disquisition on how we all give off certain frequencies and how our “audience,” which is to say the people who are most likely to receive them, is both receptive to and in turn responsible for the way the message is perceived and disseminated. It doesn’t sound like much now, but I promise you it will almost be as good as my long-awaited piece on The Four Kinds of People, which will in and of itself be worth the, uh, 10 dollars a month you’ll be wanting to stump up for exclusive JoAD content. ($10 a month is also an assumption based on my ability to no longer feel shame, which is more than anything a bet on how badly my finances decline as I continue to watch my brilliance go unremunerated because of my ludicrous self-regard and comical “principles.”) Anyway, Frequencies. It’s coming, and it’s all about you!]
As I was saying, you are probably a lot like me in that you have difficulty in reconciling the terrible person you know yourself to be with the person you hope that others perceive you as (and who you hope that wishing alone will effect transformation into, because boy does the stuff you’d have to do to actually become all those things seem like a lot of unpleasant work). This is why you do not feel like an adult, no matter how much your mortgage is or where your kids go to summer camp or how many parents you’ve buried: It’s because you still think there is something better that is going to turn up, and that something better is the you you’ve always assumed you were somehow going to turn into someday. I have bad news for you. It’s never going to happen.
Think about the most successful people you know. Think about the happiest people you know. Think about the most adult people you know. The odds are that the one thing they all have in common is they have looked deeply into their souls and decided that either they were and had been all along the person that they always aspired to be or they realized that the flawed, fatigued face that they see staring back in the mirror is indeed exactly who they are, and even if it is the kind of person who says one thing and does another, who doesn’t try as hard as they should not to damage other people while they barrel toward their own self-fulfillment, who will elbow everyone out of the way once they’ve decided it’s their time to be rewarded, they’re okay with it. Once a person reaches that kind of acceptance a gigantic psychic burden has been lifted, and all the discord and doubt that has been holding them back for so long vanishes into the ether. It is at that point that a person becomes an adult. Those of us who are still not there are mired in our liminal (sorry, I find that word obnoxious too) state for the very reason that we refuse to acknowledge how defective and irreparable we really are. Or at least that’s the theory.
On the other hand, let me tell you a story. I had an uncle who was a great deal older than the parent of mine to whom he was a sibling, as he was the issue of a grandparent’s first marriage. I did not know him very well growing up, since he lived in a major midwestern city and made it out this way infrequently. Toward the end of his life, the solitude and cold weather began to take its toll and, in his infirmity, it was decided that he should be closer to my parents, who helped him move back east. Shortly after he arrived he came to a dinner celebrating my birthday. He asked me how old I was and I told him 35, to which he responded, “Well, that’s the perfect age. You know who you are but it’s not too late to do something about it.”
I am of course considerably older than 35 at this point, and I clearly did not take my uncle’s advice. (I may not, in fact, have known who I was just yet.) But what I obviously did was integrate that concept into my own sense of How A Person Should Be. (After all, my uncle had spent a great deal of time not dying, so surely he had all the answers.) And when my young acquaintance asked me about adulthood my sincere response—“when you figure out who you are and you learn to be okay with it”—was my own adaptation of that advice. But the more that I think about it the more I realize my initial answer was the correct one. Look around you: What makes you happy? Not a lot, probably. How long does it last when it does? Not long, probably. You can spend five minutes walking down the street and the sheer level of distress you pull from the faces of people passing by can be enough to sideline you for several hours while you keep yourself in a corner hoping no one will watch you cry. And yet you still somehow believe there’s a way that things will get better. I am again sorry to say to you that there is not. Adulthood, as I initially responded in a way that was more right than I knew, is a matter of accepting that everything is just going to hurt from now on. Thank you for your attention.