Rejuvenation
No one says “lit” anymore. You can say “hard,” as in, “that song is so hard,” but I haven’t quite identified all the situations in which it’s appropriate. Everyone knows everyone else’s sign, not just their sun sign but their moon and their rising sign. When they learn someone’s birthday, they inevitably sigh and say, “That explains so much.”
A side-effect of career switching in your thirties is that suddenly all your coworkers are ten years younger than you. At work I’m still the clueless newbie who’s always asking if I’m doing things the right way, but when we drink our coffee in front of the bodega during break, I feel so old. (Actually, they smoke and drink coffee and I sip my matcha latte because I can’t handle that much caffeine anymore.)
Mostly I’m psyched to be older. (I’m sure no one says “psyched” anymore, right?) It’s like getting to revisit my twenties as a wiser and more secure version of myself. I can actually engage in conversation now, instead of trying so hard to seem cool that my anxious inner monologue drowns out what people are saying to me. I know a lot more stuff about the world and I make better decisions than I used to. I don’t want to date my coworkers or, in fact, anybody, which turns out to be a tremendous load off in dealing with people. It’s fun just to be around them and absorb their energy. I don’t even need their blood.
There’s also a humility buried in all that twenties-kid swagger that is more receptive to learning from the world. There’s an excitement about what’s coming next that people who are “established” in their careers sometimes lack. They talk about their future in these vague, hypothetical ways because it must feel, right at the beginning of a career, that there are so many directions it could go.
Getting older is a gradual closing off of possibilities, each decision shutting the door to an infinity of people you could meet, places you could live, ways you could spend your time. I don’t find that depressing — there’s just only so much you can do in a life. I know I’m not old, but I’m at an age when big things that I want, like starting a family, have immediate implications for me. I think about the future differently than I did — less like cannonballing into a lake with my eyes closed and more like choosing a distant island to swim towards. It makes sense for dreaming to firm up into planning as you age. I’m a little more stable and set these days, and while that stability is mostly a source of comfort for me, I’ve stayed out late a few times in the last month, until bars close or the sun comes up, and there’s this impression of brimming, endless, elastic potential that comes from being rich in time.