On travel, escapism, and delaying adulthood
I’m eagerly awaiting Miriam Webster’s call to use my likeness for the word loser since, I think I am a textbook example of one by most metrics. Well, loser, pathetic, failure, whatever they prefer. I’m versatile that way. I’m 25, I still live at home, I can’t drive, I’m still working part time retail, and probably worst of all I never grew past 6 feet tall. I am far from impressive. Everyone around me seems to have started their careers, they’re moving out, and generally just getting on with their lives . Here I am , still sleeping in my childhood bedroom, the walls still that light blue colour I insisted on when I was 8 years old. I used to spend excited insomniac nights here dreaming of everything I could be when I grew up. Now dusty relics of my ambitions keep piling high; my Ukulele I never learned, workbooks for languages I still can’t speak, and my unicycle still untamed. All once tokens of passion and potential, now monuments in my little museum of failure.
It is hard to pinpoint exactly when the perspective shifted form all that I could be to this is all that I am. Officially I assume there is probably a government file somewhere, and a little box under my name is ticked to mark my potential as wasted. All done by a tutting clerical officer, shaking their head and whispering what a shame. I partly blame COVID. It’s hard to make the most of life in and out of lockdown. Those lockdowns completely fucked my perception of time too. In my mind, I’m still twenty, with plenty of time to figure things out, but I blinked once and woke up five years later with almost no recollection of how I got here. Now I don’t really think that anyone has their life figured out by 25, but I don’t know many working the same shit retail job I have been working at since I was 19. Comparison is the theft of joy, but when your friend has been promoted 4 times while you are still stacking fruit for minimum wage it’s hard not to feel just a little shit about yourself. I try to think back about what I’ve accomplished over the last 5 years, something solid I can hold onto. Yet, the slightest bit of knitpicking and it will simply turn it to sand and crumble between my fingers.
Between lockdowns, college, and a half-dozen personal detours I’m not quite ready to discuss. The years that were supposed to be my early 20s just kind of slipped away. I’m not unique in this, I know that. I am sure all of you reading (all two of you) feel cheated out of time in some way due to lockdown. The pandemic stole a lot of people’s twenties, thirties, forties, fifties and hundreds. As much as I want to blame it on the system, the proverbial “man” keeping me down, I don’t think things really would have been different had lockdowns not happened. I have been a mess most of my life: a complete hotpot of anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorder, depression. Between self-help, professional help, and tweaking medication, I think I was only just about a functioning human by the time I graduated college. It was only really by age 22 really I began to have time to catch up on all those keystone developmental experiences, learning to walk and talk for example. By 23 I was starting to form actual sentences. At 24 I showed the first faint signs of sentience, and now at 25 dare I say I actually feel somewhat lucid.
Now listen, I know that me complaining that I feel like I have wasted my life at age 25 is an eye rolling level of self pity. I am aware that 25 is relatively young, but that’s also when the frontal lobe kicks in. Some may even say this is where you could even begin to become a rational adult. If you did miss out on your early 20s, the mistakes, the learning, the self exploration, You can’t blame mistakes on being young and stupid any more, I now have an essence of responsibility. With a developed frontal lobe, doing fun stupid things takes a conscious effort. There’s something about making mistakes with a developed brain that turns it from being an endearing part of growing up to something else quite pathetic. And its hard not to feel like a gerriatric fuck when you see posts about what age did you settle down and everyone says 25-6 is when they couldn’t hack it any more and now love nothing more than staying home with the missus for a cuppa. I believe these people should be rounded up and shot.
So I did not have my clubbing days, I was not talking shit in someone’s kitchen until 6 am. I didn’t sleep around.. I did not have fun. I did not make the right kinds of developmental mistakes. I did not explore and now I have no idea who I am. And now I’m getting to the age I really can’t avoid getting my first real job much longer. I’m starting down the barrel of 40 years of monotony that was supposed to be sustained by the intense fun I had in my early 20s. But there is a way, there is a way I can keep going just a little longer. A way to make mistakes, explore and find myself without worry of coming across as pathetic: travel. My last socially sanctioned chance to do all the identity forming nonsense I should have done differently. Maybe I’ll become a beatnik. On the road. Well we’ll see, but anyway that’s what this blog is about. A last ditch attempt to have some fun and make up for lost time, and hopefully not feel pathetic about it.
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