Leveling Up

Why are human beings so terrified of aging? It’s an inevitability. An unwinnable battle. It’s like resenting the fact that we have to breathe air and spending inordinate amounts of time attempting to hold our breath to keep the oxygen at bay. It doesn’t make a damn bit of sense.

Aging is such a beautiful thing. Every wrinkle is a life experience; a feeling, a thought, a moment that becomes etched into our skin and part of the story of who we are. Youth has its gifts: freshness, agility, change. It’s formless bark stretching toward sky. But age is the ripe fruit, the sweetness of reward. Wisdom makes the human eye sparkle in a way that nothing else can. Freckles and marks and snowy hairs should be worn with pride, like hard-won battle scars. They remind us that we have lived.

Instead, human beings have it all backward… as usual. It’s become a habit to dig our claws deep into the fictional caricature that we are taught we are supposed to want to be.

I mean, yes, of course everyone wants to be young to have energy and be healthy and feel good. That’s a given. But that aside, I’m talking about this unhealthy obsession with youthful = desirable. It’s a disease that dooms us to gradually disliking ourselves more and more as time passes and we can’t escape from it. Women especially will pay an obscene amount of money and put themselves through dumbfounding amounts of pain just to keep measuring themselves against a standard that they cannot possibly keep. And have you ever noticed?

Those people that resist aging the most are the ones that tend to make themselves the least attractive. They chip away at their exterior bit by bit until they become what they fear the most. Yet those that surrender to aging are often extraordinarily beautiful; they glow from within. Beauty has a lot less to do with what people look like and more to do with who people are.

I honestly don’t know a single person that has actually said to me that they are happy to be aging. Everyone regrets it, resents it, hates being subjected to the reality of it every birthday. It’s a reminder of shortcomings, and the massive gap between who people are and who they want to be. It’s a glance at the clock to remember that time is always slipping away. I feel sad when I hear every self-critical comment that the people I love make up about themselves.

Why do we keep framing the future with the dusty and broken bits of generations past? The world around us is transforming ever-quicker. Humanity is the cocooned caterpillar with its guts all strewn about in reassembly. When we eventually come out of all this seeming chaos, the transformation is going to be incredible. We aren’t even going to recognize ourselves.

I fucking love my silver hairs. They show that I’ve been through some shit, and I’m okay with that. I’m getting way more pleasure out of this stage of my life than any that came before. From now on, every birthday isn’t just another candle on the cake. It’s a level up. An achievement unlocked. A rung higher on the ladder and plenty of bragging rights.

Fuck what society says we’re supposed to think about ourselves; throw that nonsense to the wind. Life is movement and aging is fun. Let’s do something crazy: let’s decide to like ourselves, just as we are.

I Know Not I

A step, a quiet echo, And a lonely lullabye The softly swaying branches Crashing waves, a soundless sigh The noose that hangs there, low It cries and weeps, You pass it by. The wind, it whispers cold to you, the words: “I wonder why.”

The seed, it sits in soil, Where it doesn’t strain or try; It’s patient as the hot sun And at peace with being dry. It waits until the water drips, As skies begin to cry Its heart it beats a simple song, it sings: “I know not I.”

Swimming Frogs

I’ve been doing a lot of healing lately, and coming to terms with a lot of things in my past. I realize that there are so many insights as to why I am the way I am buried in memories that I’ve forgotten about. And over time, we all begin to remember the stories that we tell ourselves of the past, rather than the events that actually transpired. My memory has clouded with time and I’ve been aware of it for a while now. I recently got the idea that maybe I should re-read my old journals. I wrote in a fat stack of notebooks, off and on, from age 8 to 18. And I haven’t read them in a long, long time. There’s an ocean of pain tucked in between those ink-stained pages, and I spent a very long time trying to pull myself out of my own darkness. I never wanted to re-read them and lose myself inside of that… but now I’ve been working on doing the opposite of that for the last year, and diving into my pain instead of running from it. Going back to the past seemed like an opportunity — and now I can say, I’m really I’m glad I’m doing it.

I’ve only read through two of them so far (ages 12-14 — I can’t seem to find the journal I had when I was younger) but my experience so far has been absolutely eye-opening. There is a lot that I had forgotten. 12-year-old Tien opens the journal by complaining about how disgusting it is to have a period and gushing over her best friend / boy she spent all of her time with in 6th grade that she was crushing on. Then there’s a giant gap in between entries where she stopped writing because she no longer felt safe doing so, after her cousin snuck into her room, read her journal, and then embarrassed her in front of his friends by telling them her secrets.

When she finally picks up writing again after moving, her full sentences, excellent spelling, and delightful vocabulary are quickly replaced by 13-year-old Tien, who has been ruined by the internet and now writes extremely long and detailed descriptions of her days in sentences that look like this: “well I wuz gonna do it l8er cuz I wuz mad @ him n e wayz.” She signs all of her journal entries with forcefully positive affirmations like, “keep smiling!!!” and “Just be happy anyway because you CAN!!!!” with excessive exclamation points. She completely glosses over some of the most painful moments, eager to replace them with “the positive side of things” to show how mature she is. This gradually changes, however, into 14-year-old Tien who is trying desperately to cope with her stepdad, Bill, having terminal cancer and feeling completely, utterly alone and friendless, an alien that doesn’t know how to fit in with teenagers. In her words: “I’m just not good with people my age. I’m much better friends with people ages 20-30 because they sort of have their shit together, but aren’t complete moronic adults yet.”

Doing all of this has been really, really healing for me and I’ve only barely started. But in the interim, I wanted to share this little humorous progression that had me absolutely laughing my ass off. I completely forgot about this. I had pet swimming frogs for a short time, and every so often I would write a sentence or two about them. This is the story of my ill-fated frog friends:

Nov 15, 2000 You know what? I never did tell you about my pet frogs. They’re swimming frogs. Their names are Zeus and Twit.

Jan 19, 2001 I got two more frogs, Jolly Rodger, Mr. Sunshine, and Ed. Zeus died.

Jan 30, 2001 Zeus didn’t die. It was Ed. We got some new frogs, though — Boggleye, Speckles, Petunia, Ishy Squishy, and the littlest one, Harold. Oh yeah, Twit and Speckles died.

Feb 21, 2001 All my frogs are dead. I have to get some new ones.

Don’t ask me why they all died. I don’t know. I’m not even sure that I knew why they kept dying back then. I took good care of them, or so I thought. I think that’s why I finally gave up on them. But I’ll tell you this: adult Tien barely remembered those frogs, and did not foresee that ending. I damn near peed my pants I was laughing so hard. Those poor frogs. It’s these little details that make me really glad that I kept a journal.

Oh, and there was that time when 13-year-old Tien went on a trip to San Francisco with her mom and Bill and had no sense of how people with money lived. She thought she was being helpful, remembering to lock the car as she got out of it after noticing that Bill had “forgotten” to lock it. She didn’t know that this was because the nice people at the hotel would park it for you. Nice people that had to spend twenty minutes trying to figure out how to get the car open (that had the keys in the ignition and was running) while a line of cars had backed up behind it.

Oh, tiny Tien, you sure as hell entertain me. Well, at least I can honestly say I almost always had good intentions!