38
For reference: 37, 36, 35, 34, 33, 32, 31, and 30.
As per usual, in the month leading up to this expected turn of events, I start asking myself the big questions: Is it still appropriate to eat popcorn for dinner? and Can sparkly continue to be my favorite color? and of course, Have I changed?
Based on last night, popcorn for dinner is a-okay, and a friend’s birthday card proclaims, “Glitter is not a phase” (phew!). But really…*have* I changed? To find out, I immerse myself in the past. I dig through old emails, a voyeuristic endeavor involving a revolving cast of characters as we create, navigate, contemplate and sometimes obliterate relationships; I skim journal entries packed with emotional-vomit(the angsty cousin to word-vomit) and unfettered stream-of-conscious; I Facebook stalk. I relive agitation and ebullition, all in the name of corroboration.
It’s like taking a drive through my hometown. The streets are packed with an effervescent of what was.
Some of the takeaways aren’t pretty. Like, so often in attempts to be kind, I was remarkably cruel.
But pretty or not, I see myself.
And it occurs to me…I’ve always celebrated personal change. If I’ve changed, then I’ve learned. And if I’ve learned, then I’ve grown. And if I’ve grown, then I’m getting closer to the version myself I’ve been cultivating since the days of driving down E Street. But change both takes time and is happening all the time. Change takes place in the moments that can never be changed. And I don’t ever pull over and celebrate the parts of myself that are static: My molecules. My memories. My mistakes.
Oof. My mistakes. If I’m being honest, my mistakes are why I look so hard for change. They hurt to remember, and yet I can’t quite seem to forget them.
My friend Kathy, who’s been an adult in my life since I was a teenager, would laugh gently if I told her this over coffee and hashbrowns. You think too much, she’d say. Amy would remind me that my choices then created who I am now. Dorianne Laux would write a poem about it. In fact, she did:
Regret none of it, not one
of the wasted days you wanted to know nothing,
when the lights from the carnival rides
were the only stars you believed in, loving them
for their uselessness, not wanting to be saved.
You’ve traveled this far on the back of every mistake,
ridden in dark-eyed and morose but calm as a house
after the TV set has been pitched out the upstairs
window. Harmless as a broken ax. Emptied
of expectation. Relax. Don’t bother remembering
any of it. Let’s stop here, under the lit sign
on the corner, and watch all the people walk by.
In other words: Mistakes don’t define us, they make us. And what a fucking life I’ve made over the last year. There was exploring Yosemite in one the best 24 hours periods I’ve had with my parents to date, hearing Kai Rysdal say my and Angie’s names on NPR, and feeling a sense of legacy while sitting at a family reunion. I rode ski lifts in California, Utah, and Montana, drank beer in Madison, Portland, and Delray Beach, and danced to vaporwave, Phish, and Vulfpeck. I added Wellbutrin to my daily Prozac dose, dabbled in ketamine and muscle relaxers, and learned the hard way that cannabis and ecstasy don’t mix. I didn’t do everything right, but I did everything because of that.
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