Written on the Occasion of My Twenty-Ninth Birthday

June 28, 2024

Am I losing my grasp on unreality? Can I any longer call myself a dreamer and a bumbler? Is the Romantic period of my life over for good? Am I on the road to becoming… boring?

I am now twenty-nine years old, and quickly approaching that age at which everything takes on a slightly different character. To be a bumbler in one’s 20s is all well and good, but to bumble headlong into one’s 30s is an entirely different matter.

I was spared the fate of bumbling to my own doom, but this leaves me in the confounding situation of having to reckon with much more time than I ever set aside for myself. It is characteristic of twenty-somethings to act as if they may as well be dead by the time they hit thirty, and I am no exception. In vain have I struggled to disabuse myself of the notion that if I ever do reach thirty, it will be as an entirely different person who has much more of an idea what they are doing.

Many of my heroes were hapless men who made a mess of their personal lives in the pursuit of great literature. Those that weren’t independently wealthy lived on the edge of destitution, chased by creditors and forced to grasp and beg for the scraps on which they lived. They left ruined friendships and marriages in their wake, for who could find any semblance of stability alongside such mercurial characters?

Then again, there are others who reveled in nothing less than monk-like stability, a peace and calm that left them free & easy. These, more often than not, were the lucky ones who had no need to work to earn their daily bread.

Caught in the middle of these contradictory examples, in a middle-class world where relative luxury and extreme instability go hand-in-hand, I’ve struggled to find a path that makes any sense at all. I tried to do the things that I thought made sense: I went to school, I went to Japan, I worked at a produce store, I translated tourism-related articles from Japanese to English, and then I tried to make it as a writer/podcast host. I imagined lifestyles and then I tried to live them.

While each had their moments, none of these lifestyles were particularly sustainable or fruitful. I don’t look back at any of them with the sense that I got what I wanted. In Japan, I was a neurotic mess. At the produce store, I was depressed. Freelance translation was the answer to the question: “What if searching for a job was your job?”. Creating a podcast and updating this website in the hopes of one day reaching an audience and making money just made me go crazy. The best thing I did was write my novel. I did try to sell it in the end, but that was beside the point.

The question has always been how to best facilitate the writing of essays and literature (novels, stories, poetry.) How do I do all of these things and keep myself alive? And how do I keep myself alive in such a way that I still have the time and energy remaining to do all these things? Furthermore, how do I do all this in such a way as to keep the people around me happy? Because every man who lets himself go leaves a trail of broken-hearted friends and family members behind. I’ve read enough literary biographies to understand that much. And I wonder if any of them, if given the opportunity to look back on it all, would say it was worth it.

So I must veer from the path — I must cease to bumble, and I must, to the extent required of me, become a responsible adult. And yet I must do so without becoming the most dull and insipid man on the planet, a fate that seems to befall the majority of thirty-somethings..

It’s funny, because the older people I idolized most in my teens and twenties have turned out to be those who retained the spirit of teenhood and twenty-something-hood far beyond its shelf-date, and as I’ve grown up I’ve realized that they often suffered the consequences. For some reason, I still feel beholden to these dreams and aspirations of my younger self; I still feel like I need to become the man my twenty year-old self wanted me to be, even though my twenty year-old self is long dead, and in dying revealed himself to be an idiot.

As I bumble my way into proper adulthood, perhaps I must reckon with the fact that there is no magic bullet: that there is no “perfect lifestyle” that will allow me to balance all that I wish to balance. As one side of the scale descends, the other rises. There’s no perfect way to face all this; there exists no perfect biography.

I can no longer be the way I was when I was younger. I don’t know how to be the way I will be when I am older. I’m not entirely sure how to be the way I am right now.

Believe it or not, I’m no longer twenty-eight years old.