on turning twenty-two in the year 2020.
There’s a certain rite of passage when you turn twenty-two. All the major young adult milestones are presumably behind you: you’ve voted in an election, had your first legal drink of alcohol, and graduated from university. Everything ahead of you now exists in the postgraduate limbo called the rest of your life. You also listen to Taylor Swift’s “22” because i don’t know about you, but you wouldn’t really be twenty-two without it.
A perfect storm of happy, free, confused, and lonely.
Take these last three minutes and twenty seven seconds with your hipster glasses and oversized t-shirts. You may never feel this way again, but
everything will be alright if we just keep—
“22” is a song that has turned an unremarkable age into a fanciful destination. Nothing is new anymore, but you’ll know the feeling of one of those sleepless nights–those nights you were surrounded by everyone and no one at the same time, where nothing felt like everything and everything you could have ever wanted was in one place, and it could have been a perfect polaroid to recall in your sentimentally senile days . When Red debuted in 2012 with the masterpiece that is “22”, we were twelve going on thirteen: we had just found our first footholds in our teen years with this beacon of twenty-two to look up to. Some day we would know what it would feel like to dress, look, act carefree and unencumbered in the cosmic glow of our birthday.
When we get to that fateful day, the self-referential title serves its fullest purpose. “22” is about turning 22, embracing it, wondering what it’s all about. When we play it at the loudest volume our speakers can tolerate and shout the chorus at the top of our lungs, it’s the hoping and wanting and celebrating the misery and magic of turning twenty-two in a cursed year.
When you’re a kid, you close your eyes and blow out your candles to count down the days until you become an adult. Twenty-one is supposed to be the last milestone of young adulthood. It’s the line in the sand that demarcates before and after. A concrete moment in time that soon slips past, and the years become quicksand draining to the bottom of the hourglass. There are no more deadlines to meet, just darkness at the finish line.
That treacherous darkness has crept up on us the same year we are turning twenty-two. The same year that was supposed to hold a college graduation, post-graduate travels, moving to a new city, starting a full-time job—now footnotes to an unfathomable tragedy of the commons. To come of age in truly the strangest of times.
2020 has been a typhoon of magic and misery. An agent of chaos that tore through the bedrock of every institution we thought we knew. A year of nothing but bad news and steeply-sloped curves. We have all written and spoken about it at length, and there will never be enough words for it; and furthermore, any attempt to summarize these events in a year-end reflection would be disingenuous. The wounds are still raw and reeling and the nation has never stopped bleeding. We may never recover from the ghosts of living in this haunted madhouse, but the least we can do is shut them in the attic, go downstairs to the living room couch, and watch the sparkling ball drop on the cusp of 2021.
Back in May, I wrote i need to get my story straight to get my own story straight about graduating virtually and the whirlwind of moving out, saying goodbye, and closing a chapter on life. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever tried to write and it felt so important to me in the moment. Throughout the seven months and multiple lifetimes since I finished it, I come back to it and reflect on how little has changed. How fractured my emotional state had been at the time when I wrote it, how I had been so desperate to write my way out of my own feelings, and how the Elmer’s glue didn’t hold up when I held up the mirror at the end of December.
At the end of December, in the minutes and few hours before the glistening mirrorball descends upon an empty Times Square, I find myself searching for answers to everything I had been missing and looking for this past year. Waiting for the crystal ball to drop and ordain our futures for the next year, the tea leaves of what 2021 may have in store for me now.
happy
There’s no preamble here on the meaning of happiness and whether it exists or how to attain it. We are all some combination of too disillusioned, despondent, and delirious to debate on happiness. 2020 itself is the prognosis of a bad time; in future years, it will become an omen. When times are bad, we turn to things that we think will make us happy. That matters a lot: finding the small, simple joys in things and holding on whenever possible.
It’s about finding and creating joy when we can. There’s so little of it these days that we should be thoughtful and open about how we care for ourselves and for others. These days, it’s in the small things. Receiving a nice email in your inbox; seeing well-wishes in an unexpected text; and people who show up for you even when it’s hard. The devil is always in the details. Feeling seen and heard in the small, minute details shows you were paying attention, and that attention is what sustains us. Going out of our way to do those small acts of kindness is kindling: it might not make us any happier, but it will make us kinder. If we can spark a little joy, we will all be better for it.
I spent many quarantine months figuring out what made me happy, because whatever I had up until that point wasn’t quite doing it for me. I clung to empty rituals as a life raft, and when they didn’t work, I found myself spiraling. I had been so enamoured with practices and pretense that would confer feelings of self-described satisfaction or fulfillment. The proverbial glass isn’t half-empty or half-full when the looking glass is foggy to begin with. Not sure if we’re looking at our true selves, who we think we are, or the version we project upon others. I am starting to learn how to let go and not base my emotional state on the whims of the world. The world changes so quickly that the emotional whiplash is seldom worth it. Lately, I have been reevaluating the things that make me happy and how to find that elusive equanimity I have always been looking for.
When I found myself more empty than I was happy, I had this restless and disruptive energy that neutralized me in turn. It made me feel complacent and lethargic, a little more hopeless and resigned than my disposition normally called for. Resignation was how I felt for most of this past year. I am resolved to demand more of myself. I think I wanted to be angry at myself, but I’m not, nor should I be.
A word from the unwise: you should never be angry with yourself; be gentle, be kind.
I have some resolutions for the new year. I haven’t written them down yet, because writing them is the very first step to realizing them, but I will. Time will tell on where I go from here.
free
Freedom as an oxymoron in the year the word “quarantine” entered the public consciousness and embedded itself into our national lexicon. No conversation could end without at least one reference to quarantine activities or feelings because it was on all of our minds and there was no point in beating around the bush. Days and months and nearly a year spent indoors as time melded into a messy mirage of bread-baking and Netflix binges. The headlines were a stream of white noise in the background, the torrential roar of crisis upon disaster upon tragedy.
This year was also the first time I felt free, in the cognitive and not physical sense. After I graduated in my living room and the three-seconds of my photo on the tv were up, I watched sixteen years of schooling collapse with nothing to do and nowhere to go. I could do anything and everything (within the confines of my room and the wide-open internet); it seemed like I had infinite time to channel the restless, creative energy I had bottled up, much like releasing a genie from the bottle.
Instead, I mostly did nothing.
I thought a lot. I slept some nights, couldn’t sleep on others. I questioned, mulled over my thoughts and feelings and spent cycles spinning in circles. I read, but not as much as I would have liked. I caught up on all the YouTube videos, tv shows, and movies I never had enough time for and eagerly welcomed them as distractions. I went through phases of baking and crafting and every permutation of a productive hobby I could develop via an online tutorial. I did all those things and nothing much at all (see: 2020, in review).
It was the first time I was finally unencumbered by the institutions upon which I had validated myself and sought success. I had the privilege of freedom to think and mostly do as I wanted, yet I couldn’t help but feel trapped at the same time. It didn’t make much sense, though I suspect that kind of cognitive dissonance isn’t intended to make sense. The world was once so big and seemingly imploded overnight inside the confined spaces where we waited out the storm. When the real world collapsed, the potential of the digital world rose from its chaos. There was so much I could do, and still so much work left to be done.
lonely
This has been a lonely year. Lonely in the way where we’ve all been stuck inside of our homes during extended periods of self-quarantine—but also lonely in the way where you’re supposed to be starting the rest of your life yet you’re still sitting in your childhood bedroom and navigating each existential crisis beneath the soft glow of string lights. Lonely in the way where you’re constantly surrounded by others on video calls and text messages. Blink once, and it’s an empty room; blink twice, and it’s just you and your face illuminated by the blue glow of the screen. Lonely as much as it is isolating.
Of course you can see people; but the sample size is limited and the variables are limitless. There is a guarded intimacy to a good, long video call. Physical space is bounded into rectangles side-by-side on a screen, morphed into the dreamscape backgrounds that hide our physical reality. Temporal bounds are demarcated by a timestamp that state how much time has passed since the call started, yet no time has passed at all. Intrinsic desire for social and emotional connection becomes whittled down to terse life updates, awkward icebreakers, and occasional group therapy sessions for the soul.
This was the most amount time any of us have ever spent by ourselves, alone with our thoughts and fears and hopes and dreams. The way we scared ourselves as much as the world scared us. The world has always been scary, but the terror in 2020 is in how things have been and not how they should be. When we envision personal freedoms in this modern century, we cannot do so without dialogue on racial justice and environmental justice. This was a year, burned: watching historic systems of oppression and inequality exacerbate and flare, asking how we can continue to create and promote equity when the people are listening, but those who represent the people aren’t.
Left alone to our own devices, figuratively and literally, it was a year that made us lonely and lonesome. Grateful for the people we have, forever missing our closest circle of family and friends. Counting the people who mattered most and holding them close. Yet when everyone retreated home, we also missed everyone we didn’t know. The buzz of a city street from the nameless, faceless strangers who wouldn’t give you an extra second of their day. The casual acquaintances that added such rich texture to your life: the less-than-acquaintances you crossed paths with at the same time on your daily commute, the acquaintances-by-name you would politely say hello to and nothing more, the friendly-acquaintances you would bump into at odd locations and be enthralled at just how small the world is. The people who made your life feel a little more full and lively at the edges.
confused
2020 has been a black hole of memory and time warps, and we’ll stumble into 2021 in a confused and hazy spell. Things happened that I’ve since forgotten about, and then will recall at a later date, and all those dates will have converged to a single happening in a separate lifetime. Such as: in May, we all became obsessed with Normal People. I, too, watched and read it, and then told my friends to do the same. Obama recommended in his year-end book list when 2019 was still on the cusp of becoming 2020, and Sally Rooney had been hailed as the literary voice of the millennial generation. The show became a critical darling in the late spring, when things were still bad but we thought there was a glimmer of hope for late summer. I really wish I could stop talking about this book and show, and maybe I can finally lay it to rest after this one final thought: there is a good reason we keep coming back to it.
We had more or less followed in the footsteps of Connell and Marianne: starting from those awkward teen years through the exploratory college years and all the way to the amorphous postgraduate years. We do the same things they did and caution ourselves against the same mistakes. They cite authors and texts they once read in university seminars—the syllabi and body of references that gave them the authority to reflect on socioeconomic stratification and racial disparity and systemic inequity in their own bubbles.
That might just be a function of being twenty-two, but the causality is bleak. The point of it is: I don’t think we want to know who we are. We self-diagnose and pick at our own scars until they start to bleed.
Up until twenty-two, I was foremost a student—and now I’m just me. I don’t really know who that is and there’s not enough space here to articulate that in a pithy elevator pitch. I have things I care about, things I think a lot about, things I value and keep coming back to. Then I ask myself if all of that is enough in this day and age, in this iteration, this confused imprint of a person that keeps wondering and waiting.
All the versions of myself before this year are largely volcanic ash now, preserved under the sediment of the months and years that have elapsed and exploded upon this year. The principles of my education forced me to learn and define who I was within those constructs, and now they no longer exist. There is so much to unlearn and unpack at the same time. I wonder who I am; and which parts of me I’ve sacrificed at the altar of my own expectations. There is a selfish ignorance to this train of thought, a hyper-awareness of the self and unawareness of the world. Assuredly, every other recent high-achieving college graduate feels the same way: the shell of themselves at seventeen metamorphized into relentless self-possession at twenty-one (going on twenty-two). In the apocalyptic aftermath, I am learning how to learn, and unlearn, again. Learning is lifelong, and we know how long things can be.
I celebrated many twenty-second birthdays over Zoom this year. An entire generation of twenty-two year olds forged on the dignified stage of video chat. We made endearingly embarrassing birthday powerpoints, blasted Taylor Swift as loud as our tinny computer speakers would allow, and reminisced about the last time we were all in the same physical room together (and I’ll think back to one of those perfect polaroid nights back in March and the lost time since). I was the last to turn twenty-two, and by the time it was my turn, I had already memorized the chorus at age twelve and ready to let Taylor usher me into the next ceremonial stage of life. As happy, free, confused, and lonely as I can be.
That’s where I am now. Newly twenty-two—tired of a year of false promises, and eager for a new year of promising starts. Turned 22 in 2020; 22 in 2021.
—like we’re twenty-two
i’ve been writing this essay on and off since october. made flippant jokes about quarantine existentialism, mulled over postgrad friendships and purpose in long texts, and asked myself many questions i still don’t know the answer to. here’s to twenty-two.
fin.