NO PLOT JUST VIBES

Hi ZOnNNEeRs

Have you ever stared at yourself in the mirror one morning and, despite taking a good look, didn’t recognize who you saw? For many mornings now it has been my experience. Since my teenage years, I’ve felt funky and far removed from the celebratory mood that all the media industry tries to shove down our throats when November hits, one pop star christmas album at a time. But this year, boy does it feel even weirder (mark my words for next year's mental breakdown when I sure will have found another reason why 2024 will have been ThE WeiRdEsT I’vE FelT EVer). The end of any cycle has always been unsettling. The end of year in particular is bringing both the promise of leaving behind from unnecessary weight one might have been carrying, as well as the bittersweet nostalgia of relishing in joyful memories, because if those moments happened, one thing is certain, they have passed. Lately the bittersweetness of it all has overtaken me. 

This year in particular, something big is coming to an end, and it’s complicated. It’s not  a clean cut, social media “grateful for that chapter” bullshit. It’s hard. It’s confronting and destabilizing. I’m doing life very awkwardly at the minute, and believe me, it’s not been a cute two weeks transition period, it’s been months. Most days I want to crawl out of my skin and I wish I just wasn’t myself, some days I feel nothing, some days I feel like I could take on the world. I’ve been jokingly referring to this as my “No plot, just vibes” era, when answering “I don’t FUCKING know” to any big life question I’m being asked becomes too depressing. If you too are stuck in a weird portal between past and future, hope this will find you, not because I’ll give you the answers you are looking for, but because it’s always comforting to know that someone has even less of their shit together than you do.

Grief

I knew something was off when my sense of living in the comfortable stretch of infinite present started to fade away. It didn’t say anything, it went quietly, just like someone leaving a party while people, still dancing in the living room, are oblivious to a presence vanishing. I kept on dancing, but life, as it always does, showed that something had changed. Everything feels to have accelerated and I became acutely aware of time passing. Or rather I became aware of my, ours, everyone’s passing through time. Seasons change and young youth goes missing, mine is being pushed to the horizon as some early adult memories now date more than 10 years back. Don’t get me wrong, I still consider myself young, but transitioning to true adulthood is bringing its fair share of loss and unrealized potential. Add my melancholy to the mix and you’ll find me grieving the loss of what’s now out of reach, and experiences that objectively weren’t pleasant when they happened.

Somehow I think that recognizing you’ve evolved is accepting you have passed

I weirdly miss that I’ll never be a young virtuose at anything, that I can’t fall in love recklessly with questionable people anymore because I’m too therapized. I miss spending ungodly amounts of time with my friends outside of our corporate cages, starting something and having the comfortable certainty that when I’d screw up I’d be able to start again while still being young. I miss raw powerful excitement, being naïve and dumb enough to think life is slow. I miss all my friends being in the same lifestage as I am, and I miss dreaming of who I’d be when I grow up. 

For a while, therapy massively helping, I’ve been focused on changing and seeing my life getting better as I became more aware of all the ways I am showing up fearful, all the preconceived ideas I was holding that weren’t serving me. It has been challenging and great at the same time. And in the same paradoxical fashion, while I wouldn’t want to be half as bitchy, insecure and clueless as I was in my early twenties I still feel a pinch of sadness when I observe myself and can see that this version of who I was is gone for good. Somehow I think that recognizing you’ve evolved is accepting you have passed - not in the most literal sense, but some parts of you have departed. 

While nature does work in cycles, we are not granted the gift of bending time in a perfect circle, starting each time exactly where we started before. Time is a spiral, as no year is quite the same and each experience is unique (not me recognizing the most basic time and calendar principles smh…). Your first love, whether it’s good or bad, is your only first love, your twenties whether good or bad, are always going to be your twenties, they just happen. It gives an uncomfortable importance to mundane decisions that I like to offset by reminding myself that at the scale of humanity none of this matters. It sort of helps, but it’s a blow to my cherished habit of believing in infinite new beginnings. I recently lost my grandmother who I grew up with. While we were emptying her house, we shuffled through photographs of her and her beloved sisters through the years. My uncle and mom were telling tales of their mischievous childhood with each picture. We laid flat my grandma’s family's colorful life, multiple lives, in many countries, through several wars and husbands and parties and illnesses and cigarette smoke and card games and love and disagreements but mostly love. And then my mom stopped and just stated the obvious: “she was the last of them, now they are all gone”. 

Fear

What keeps me stuck in that uncomfortable in between phase is my being terrified of what is to come next. It’s as if the veil covering how fragile life is had been lifted. I don’t want to go where the train is taking me. As if what to expect was all but a big tragedy in the making. How can we keep being so entrenched in the day to day mundane when we are one diagnosis away from hell? My brain has a hard time computing how any of life’s great pleasure is worth it, when living is also experiencing so much pain and darkness. I find it particularly challenging to accept that all beauty is fleeting.

I’m terrified of getting older, of feeling my body failing me, of never achieving the things I barely allow myself to dream of. I’m terrified of loss, of never recognizing myself again, of time passing without me noticing. I felt how everything changes by increment: you don’t notice, then you wake up and everything is different. I wonder when I’ll wake up and the comfortable feeling that the world is “mine”, you know the one you get entering young adulthood, will be gone. What do you do then? I dread the day I’ll start talking about myself solely in the past tense. All of this would be much easier had I something I’d willingly devote myself to. Something bigger that dilutes yourself, where “I” doesn't quite matter anymore. Something that makes it all worthwhile. I guess some people have kids, some have careers, some have faith. I can’t quite choose what I’ll have yet.

I dread the day I’ll start talking about myself solely in the past tense

So that’s where I am, existential, feeling weird and on the cusp of entering the arena, promising hardship. I know it’s not all black, but sometimes it just feels like it. I’ll leave you with the insights (if one can call ‘insights’ my wanky philosophy) this weird period has given me. Sometimes I want to live like a rockstar, push myself in every direction and experience it all before it ends. Most times I just catch myself taking mental pictures of moments of joy or beauty trying to keep them in mind, fighting their ephemeral nature. I try to remember to forget the dark, or at least to ground myself in the fact that life is unpredictable. We have control over nothing, and the unknown can bring both sorrow and joy, pain and pleasure. That’s why for now, before having a greater purpose towards which I could devote my life force, I chose to prioritize pleasure anyway I can, taking it one day at a time, no plot, just vibes.