Being in my mid-twenties in 2023 is weird. I suppose your mid-twenties are always weird, but I came of age on the internet of the 2010s, which probably makes it worse. I’m part of the first true set of digital natives, but old enough to remember a time before it all. Vines are a permanent part of my lexicon, but I’m losing touch of what’s in these days and what the kids are up to. I feel myself aging out of the Youth Culture. I don’t always get it anymore.
I sometimes wish I were about a decade older, and the writer in me would’ve truly hit my stride on the internet. My blog from my mid-twenties would’ve turned into a book deal or two or three and I’d write long, beautiful captions about love and loss and how real life is different than this highlight reel. I’d have a really great Substack now.
I don’t say that disparagingly. I love some of those accounts and subscribe to several newsletters. But I am also young enough to know that sincerity on Instagram is mostly dead. It’s casual again, but reductive, making a meme or a zingy one-liner out of a photo dump that is half cute and half blurry. I am getting old. My Instagram will at least be cool.
That is a ridiculous metric to have, but alas. We all have something.
So instead, I write this, like it’s still a thing people do. My Google Docs is full of half-written essays, I suppose as a means to process the last several months of life outside of the plastic-bound ninety-nine-cent composition notebook I use as a journal and scattered text to friends. It soon becomes apparent that I don’t want to write about much of anything. There is not a particular story I want to tell, or a Capital-P Point I want to get across. I just want to write about gratitude in a way that feels far too honest.
What I want to write is an Instagram caption circa 2015. You know the type. A little too long and too narrative, but surprisingly poignant.
I’m stage managing a couple plays right now, both hard and beautiful and heavy and hopeful in their own ways. I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of watching them, of hearing them, of feeling them and breathing with them in the way I have to in order to do my job well.
They’re both plays that care a lot about their words (any play worth its salt does). One, in lilting verse with internal rhymes that delights in the sounds of the words themselves; the other, run-on sentences riddled with dashes and commas and I mean, you know, she was like – until short sentences and one-word paragraphs pack a punch.
I find myself echoing them stylistically as I write lately, editing down when something feels like too direct a reference. The language has bored its way into the part of my brain that thinks about words and turns over turns of phrase like song lyrics.
I don’t really know how to parse that paradox of creativity and spending my entire day entrenched in these plays. It’s exhausting. It’s inspiring. It’s annoying how hard it is to not think about it.
Sometimes, I wish I were a poet. I wish I had the facility of language to be so simple and expansive all at the same time. I wish I could pick the most specific, heartbreaking, crystallizing detail to craft an image.
I’m jealous of those that can, of the playwrights and poets and writers I read and know and love. Prose is the only thing I’m good at. I’ve never had to think about it. I am, by nature, long-winded.
So consider this the Instagram caption I would write if I didn’t care so much, if all of this could fit in the character limit. Picture a carousel of blurry pictures of my friends and me laughing, forced-perspective overhead of a board game, my roommate asleep on the couch. Maybe a picture of my morning coffee in a mug I got as an opening gift, an inside joke. Diner breakfast Monday. The sunset over the cornfields of Wisconsin.
I’ve seen the last fifteen minutes or so of Our Town a lot lately.
At the theatre where I work, there is usually a show happening in each of the two performance spaces at any given time. The play that I’m working on typically performs at the same time as Our Town. My show is only 90 minutes, compared to the two and a half hours of the Wilder play. That means most nights, I can run my show, send all my emails, wrap up for the night, and walk through the woods to catch the final moments of what I genuinely believe is one of the best plays ever written. I’ve done it four times in the last month.
My favorite line in the play has always been, “Everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings.” That feels both far too obvious and far too profound to unpack here, so I won’t. Instead, I’ll use the moment that I’ve seen the most, that somehow never fails to make me a little teary.
Spoiler alert for a ninety-year-old play you might have read in high school English class. Emily is dead, and before she settles into the afterlife, she relives her twelfth birthday. It all proves too much – we don’t notice life as we live it! – and she delivers a goodbye to the world, listing off things that matter. Her parents. Hot baths. And food and coffee and sleeping and waking up.
Every time I hear her say it, I, too, am grateful for those things.
I am so grateful for my very ordinary life.
It’s an insane thing to realize you’re alive. That sudden, oh. We’re here. I have this moment, every so often – in the split second before I send an email, when I order my coffee from a barista who’s starting to recognize me, folding laundry, cooking chicken and roasting brussel sprouts, checking my account balance – where I realize I’m living a whole life. I’m an adult. I have become a version of the person I always dreamed I would.
That’s dramatic and oversimplified, sure. For all the ways I’ve made it there are a dozen I haven’t, my life isn’t perfect, I remain anxious and persevere despite the fear that I think we all are haunted by, that waxes and wanes with the season: what if I’m doing everything wrong? We are all just making everything up, always, after all.
But that email, that gas receipt that’s been sitting in my cupholder for a week, that salad I accidentally let sit in the fridge too long – is proof of something. I’ve made it, somehow.
I saw both Barbie and Oppenheimer this weekend (both excellent), and have been listening to a lot of Taylor Swift, thanks to the recent re-release of Speak Now (always my favorite of her albums). Suffice to say, I’m in my head about the Nature of Being Alive and Growing Up and Being a Good Person.
I want to talk about the weird in-between of childhood and adulthood, all the arrogance and loneliness and nostalgia and melodrama. How I can feel the push and pull of it all as I grow into myself. There’s a world in which I wax poetic about the Sandra Cisneros of it all, how being twelve and being twenty-four don’t really feel all that different, but also like entirely separate lives.
But honestly? I don’t know how to do that.
I don’t know how to capture what it feels like. Perhaps I’m just self-aware and also anxious, in environments that foster exploration of really big questions. Maybe I hope everyone feels this way and I don’t need to explain it. You just know what I mean. It’s so gradual, so deeply normal and un-extraordinary but unavoidably present and sometimes urgent. Do you ever really feel grown up? Do you ever outgrow feeling just a little bit proud of yourself for sending a big email or taking your car in or calling the bank or remembering to buy toilet paper? Does that pride ever stop feeling silly? It’s all very self-conscious in a way that feels childish. I know I’m still so, so young. There is so much ahead of me still. I don’t think about that every day, though. Most days, I get up, go to work, come home, ignore the dishes and the laundry, and go to bed. Most days, I spend too much time on my phone.
I go to work. I sit in an office and take a lot of meetings and make a lot of spreadsheets and send a lot of emails and get to tell stories all day. My job is objectively very weird and very cool and uninteresting unless you understand a lot of things that are difficult to explain. Unless you care so much. It feels dorky to care so much. But truthfully, I do. I have the best job in the world and it feels like a gift to get to do it every day. Maybe one day I’ll write about that. How in love with it I am.
I have friends and family who love me, who share their homes and beds and food with me and are the best people I know. They let me exist in their spaces, they let me rant about Shakespeare, they entertain three-hour FaceTime calls ranging from “did you hear the new song from that band we like” to “am I fundamentally capable of love.” I miss my mom. My dad still reads every contract I get before I sign it. My brother and I kind of accidentally started sharing a Spotify account. I call my grandparents every couple weeks. I wish I called them more.
I still don’t really think I know how to be a person very well yet, but if this version of me sticks around for several more years, I won’t be mad. I like her. I like the life I’m building. I’m genuinely just so thrilled to be here, to get to do this. I’m excited to get to do it more, to keep loving and living and getting better at all of it all the while. It’s so fun.
This is the version of sincerity I miss from the internet. My generation is not great at it, I think, because we all know the world is burning literally and figuratively and it feels scary and overwhelming and kind of pointless? Like screen time and most foods and plastic packaging, I know wallowing isn’t good for me. The nihilism feels inevitable. Just look around. And yet. My existentialist bend fights hard to win in a world in which we have sunlight and flowers and Rice Krispie Treats and season one of Ted Lasso and Emily Henry books and the US Postal Service. I want to continue to acknowledge joy. There is so much of it.
As I write this, I’m curled up on the couch, coffee brewing and filling the house with one of the best smells in the world. I woke up before my alarm. I am, for better or worse, a morning person. The sun is up, but it doesn’t quite feel like the world is awake yet. It’s my favorite time of day.
I have errands to run, meals to prep, sheets I should probably wash. Later, I’ll go to work. Then, I’ll come home, take a shower, and go to sleep. And tomorrow, I wake up and get to do it all again.
What a joy that is.
So, Um...Yeah 