A goth balm for time
Beyond mythic adulthood and the yardstick of years
People in my neighborhood are already starting to decorate for Halloween with strings of plastic ghosts and pumpkin-colored skeletons. It seems a little early for that, but still, fall is in the air. This golden fulcrum of summer—all its early crisping, drying, slowing, and darkening—instantly calls to mind so many transitions to fall I’ve experienced in my lifetime. This dense collage of memories stretches back to adolescence. There’s the texture of a pea coat I wore as a teen and there’s Labor Day weekend of 2008, when I was arrested outside the RNC in my hometown St. Paul—the sting of pepper spray and the flourescent carnival scene at the jam-packed jail where I found myself with hundreds of others who had similarly been hemmed in by flanks of police staging mass arrests. (That’s a story for another time...) There’s also the fall not so long ago when I lived in partially-finished yurt, one heated by the good grace of a space heater and a heavy-duty extension cord. And there’s the fall when I moved into the house where I still live—almost two years now. There’s a through line between those events and my present circumstance, but the sudden wash of reminiscence does feels like prematurely graduating from this moment I’m in, with all of its unfinished business—the projects, curiosities, and dilemmas of summer that I’m not ready to let go of.
I don’t know if that statement stands up to analysis, because the seasonal shift doesn’t really require me to surrender my current set of interests or ambitions (except maybe my bloated list of household tasks that require warm, dry weather). Mixed in with my predictable white girl love of autumn I do nonetheless, on some level, feel a little vexed by its return. Even cyclical time (the seasonal ebb and flow) can remind me of things I want to do but haven’t yet: “Holy shit, summer is almost over and I still haven’t gotten a new job, finished an essay, etc etc.” This stings, even if or when those outcomes aren’t truly time sensitive. Fresh awareness of time’s passage feeds the anxiety of unrealistic expectations.
A dear friend, packing up their apartment to move across the country, recently unearthed a letter they’d written me last Thanksgiving and put it in the mail. One of the things they wrote was about being in their 30s, and how odd it is to feel almost old without the stability they’d expect to accompany that. But then again, the outward features of mythic adulthood—especially when it comes to personal finances—haven’t been things they’ve prioritized or even recognized as desirable until recently, so it’s not surprising that they wouldn’t have them yet. Internally they feel a growing sense of ease and stability, though the external details of their life still feel rough around the edges.
When I read this letter in bed a few weeks ago, I’d been feeling salty about myself and my situation; it was comforting to recognize the shape of my experience in their words. Our bank had just informed us that they’d miscalculated our property tax amount for the past year (which they pay on our behalf). To catch up, we’d be paying them $400(!) more every month starting immediately. I don’t have a real job right now and already felt on edge about money, so the news felt cataclysmic. Days before that, we discovered our toilet had been leaking, and I had gone on an adrenalized DIY campaign dealing with the problem and its aftermath. I spent a recent Sunday afternoon crouched under our house with a sponge and a bucket of borax solution, craning my neck and scrubbing away pee water. Also, our next door neighbors’ dog—beautiful snow white and basically feral—was coming by our yard all the time again, terrifying our dog and ticking me off. Their roosters had been particularly obnoxious lately, too, with their near constant daytime squawking. What had I gotten myself into, paying way more than I can afford to live in this combo platter of misery?
Feeling woefully under-prepared and under-resourced/under-equipped when it comes to specific adult responsibilities spills over into my general sense of self. I read it as symbolic, rather than a reflection of discrete facts: my cost of living is high, I am in a process of career transition, our toilet leaked, our neighbors don’t have a fence, I feel a desire to spend more time making art and less time worrying over responsibilities. Some of these facts I have little or no control over; some of them are incidental but require me to respond; some of them are the consequences of my past decisions or invite me to make new ones. The specificity of those details wash out into an impressionistic painting about being under-accomplished or a bit of a fuckup. Just like I can drum up a whole narrative about time out of a slight autumnal shift, the sudden influx of problems also read like a statement on my meager prospects as an artist, a professional, and a person trying to make a home.
My therapist, who I sometimes feel is ghostwriting these letters via what he says in our sessions, gave me some insights into this hyper-critical self-talk. It is a psychological mechanism which provides the illusion of control, when really sometimes a bunch of things just go wrong: “If I had done XYZ differently, all of this ridiculous bullshit wouldn’t have happened! This is my fault, and next time I won’t let it happen.” Maybe this kind of mental chatter is also a way I reject seasonal shifts and the moods they bring. Fretting about unfinished projects could be a trick I play on myself, pretending that I could avoid the unavoidable bittersweet melancholy of fall if only I’d crossed everything off the list—that then, somehow I would feel ready for the change.
There’s also a kind of conclusive defeatism coursing through this line of thought—that reflex that says things are too far gone: too many mistakes have been made, too much time has passed, I’ve been holding onto a goal or dream for too long for it to ever come to life. This Eeyore-like lethargy feels like the flip-side of another tendency floating around the ethers, from cultish personal development figures to campaign speeches: declaring with certainty that the moment is NOW, and that NOW is when something is going to happen. This messianic, heroic posturing creeps me out and can be fraught with artificial promise (among other problems). But/and I have long felt confused and conflicted about this kind of commitment. Is that just what it looks like to go all in with a goal or aspiration? What kinds of personal and collective action leave room for ambiguity and uncertainty?
The thing about ambiguity and uncertainty—or one of the things—is that I don’t know what’s going to happen, not that it’s too late for me or that the worst thing that can happen will. I am frequently surprised by how long it takes me to do something, as well as by the coinciding events or circumstances that figure into the process—both as obstacles and as aid, or a mix of both. Take the past 1.8 years of my life. Owning a home has been bizarre and distracting and an emotional roller coaster and a blessing; I’ve spent countless hours figuring this whole situation out instead of making art, but the experience has also become the framework for the art I’m making in ways that seem uncannily tailored to the project that began long before I moved in here—and which I’m still working on.
It can be achy to take in that expanse of time, especially when what I have to show for it doesn’t line up with my expectations. But I think unspooling time against a yardstick and deciding I (or we) might as well give up now is more of an anesthetic measure than a statement of fact. As much as it hurts to decide that I’ve failed or am not worthy of going on, it provides an out of the discomfort that is being in process; it also renders that discomfort as evidence of personal shortcomings. Probably what is more true is that it just feels uncomfortable to move through time and ambition and the ambiguous dailiness of our lives and never really know how and where things are going to shake out—or really, to know that our lives can’t really be measured by the sum of outcomes we generate, even noble creative ones.
This letter got way more existential and dramatic than I planned, so I guess the tiniest suggestion of fall must really be rubbing off on me. (I see a few yellow leaves and start wax philosophical…) But then again, the topic of aging and accomplishment does invite big questions about what matters most to do and experience in this lifetime. My sometimes irrational response to being in my 30s—and more specifically, being in my 30s, not having published a book and still feeling varying degrees of financially stretched thin—also highlights for me how ageist my outlook can be. It is hard to untangle assumptions I’ve inherited about what my 30s “should” look like from my actual desires or the potential ahead of me, because those assumptions generate such profound and genuine disappointment. I will never, ever make a “30 under 30” list. That’s just not in my story. But it doesn’t mean the story that’s unfolding is so grim or doomed.
That story does have a plot line about youthful disappointment, a whole arc of turbulent questioning about the life and art I want to make. Everything I’ve learned over those years is here for me to work with, and that does feel comforting: there’s something I’ve built up over time through genuine effort. It’s kind of an intangible version of adult stability, a foundation imprinted with unmet expectations and some tough lessons I’m lucky to have learned. Meanwhile, I still dream of (and sometimes really do feel I’m living) a version of adulthood that means blossoming open—bringing ideas to life, outwardly expressing who I am in meaningful ways. I know that’s not a fixed place at which I’ll arrive or a project to master, but it does require active participation—especially when it comes to things in my life I know I want to be different. And now is as good as any other time to participate. Now holds the same seed of possibility to which I was devoted as a teenager, and which was articulated in one of my favorite CrimethInc mantras: “The future is unwritten.”
Now more than ever, I can appreciate how literal that statement is. It is a fact, not just an invocation of radical possibility, and I do find myself inflecting that fact with a bit of cynicism. But I also appreciate the openness it invites. Believing it’s not too late for things to change has little to do with the pace at which I move (or youth or what I achieve or maybe even with time at all), and everything to do with how I show up to this moment and the ones that follow.
Yours truly,
Siloh
Coming soon…
I’ve been busy behind the scenes on some projects I’ll be announcing soon, including a new website, a new coaching offering, and a revival of Experimental Practice podcast(!). I’ve been on a dense little journey this summer—a lot of soul-seeking and planning—and I can’t wait to actually share what I’ve made from that with you.
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