Neutral Buoyancy
I turned twenty-eight this week. Although not big on celebrations, I have always embraced each birthday as one does an old friend, with a deep sense of well-being and joy. Even when life was uncertain, the marker of each year brought with it a kind of guarantee that things were progressing onward and upward. I suppose this is because ever since I was young, I’ve carried the idea that life for a woman really begins at thirty. As someone who started working early, I managed to quickly attach myself to older women and hold on the best I could. In my teenage years, I would gaze up at my friends in their thirties and forties as magical, fabulous older sisters, full of vivacity, financial security, and carefree independence. Even their stressors seemed more glamorous: debating radical career moves; (seemingly!) dating without all the insecurities of youth; money (of which there was never enough, though possessing upwards of four figures seemed to present incomprehensible wealth to me back then). Anything after the forties, I didn’t know — in retrospect, I doubt any woman upward of fifty wanted much to do with a hyperactive teenager. But I had high hopes for the future.
For a long time, this proved true. Each year seemed to build upon the last. There were endless things to learn and an endless way yet to go. The unknown was challenging and exciting. And then 2020 happened and everything melted. For the first time in nearly three decades, I approached my birthday with resentment, anger. I had been trying my best to ignore the year, to treat it as incidental, and here came an event — yes! Event! — which would force me to confront not only time past, but time wasted. None of the milestones or goals I’d set for myself at the start of the year had materialized, in fact, quite the opposite — I’d spent much of the last six months negotiating personal catastrophes on good days, and simply coping on bad ones. I did not want to get older, no; to do so seemed only to concede the last frontier of time to the pandemic. Already the distance had dissolved so much: our sense of community, touch, and wonder; now it had taken this, too.
Now that you mention it, my girlfriend said, you do seem different this year; there’s an instability to you, and a certain deflatedness.
Ah, how it stung to be so clearly named. Even though I was tired of my endless pessimism, I couldn’t help myself: whenever someone asked how it felt getting older in 2020, it would all come sloshing out. I could feel them curling their toes in regret, retreating as defeat hissed out of me in a sad stream of air. I was probably turning people away, but I couldn’t stop.
I know, I said, I’ve definitely deteriorated.
No, she said, surprising me, you just used to do a lot of heavy lifting in your friendships. And now it’s everyone’s turn to encourage you.
In a year of bleakness, a glimmer of joy. I am not so naive as to suggest that a slight mental manipulation, a touch of perspective reframing, is all that’s needed to remedy a difficult year. It is not. But I felt myself reinflating, if only slightly. I went home and composed a list of small wonders, an attempt to pay careful attention to the glimpses of delight that I often turned away from, in my tending to bigger crises. When I was done, I read it over, and felt a lightness course through me. I was only looking at the last week, but it was enough.
The gift of time, from those around me. Eating banana chips under the cover of rain. A curation of memes, with my particular tastes in mind. The slow luxury of coffee, sipped over the course of a morning. A ring of bright laughter. SPF complacency and the accompanying whiplash of sunburn. A rogue midnight swim, two girls floating silently in the moonlight. Talking. Thunderstorms. Togetherness.
