24
Today I turned 24; I’m 24 years old.
My youth is kind of behind me. I’m an adult now, no bones about it. The best I can say is that I’m a young adult. And even then the adjective frays, day by day. I work in an office. I have to book leave. My boyfriend/partner is an engineer. The majority of people I know or grew up with have 9-5 office jobs, they wear suits to work, and abide by office etiquette. They have to do ironing, in the morning or before they go to sleep. I enjoy the absolutely mainstream things that any working adult would: mini-breaks to the country-side, making the most of a bank holiday. My peers are getting married and getting pregnant, and it’s not even shocking anymore. I’m falling deeper and deeper into normal adult life, and I don’t know what to do about it. I’m fucking petrified, that it’s all happening around me. It feels like all the fresh air is being sucked out of the room.
I think possibly this bothers me because all my life I have let Being Scared stop me from doing things, and now it has become evident that all this while time has just been ticking the fuck away. But what do I do, with this realization. How do I muster courage? How do I beat down self-consciousness?
But on a more positive note, something that has been lovely about turning 24: Yin planned an awesome birthday, it snowed and made everything feel awesome and special, I felt safe and loved and at home. I have an awesome boyfriend who loves me, and who I love, and I had the best time all weekend just sitting around watching Frasier and reading magazines. I’m lucky, I’m blessed, to have someone whose company I enjoy so much. Turning 24 was awesome in that respect.
Yeah, I’m not …
Yeah, I’m not happy. I don’t like living alone. It doesn’t make it better to be solely devoted during the weekend. That doesn’t make me happy either – I can’t do all the other things in my life, that I want to do, I’m sure you can relate to wanting more from your life than work and a partner.
But I don’t feel like we’re partners. Friday nights and Saturday mornings, I’m slightly confused as to who you are. I’m slightly surprised to find someone in my bed. And I sure as hell don’t recognize you emotionally. Basically, this is no maintenance of intimacy. Skype dates are no maintenance of intimacy. I don’t know what to do. I’m not happy.
The only way for me to adjust to this is to loosen my emotional bond with you. That means, seeking emotional gratification elsewhere. The first thing you can do is let me connect emotionally with my girlfriends, but that seems a problem for you as well.
Even if I were able to talk to my friends, I don’t think that would be enough. I want a partner, I want someone to come home to. I’m not asking for forever. But I am asking for comfort, for solace, for domesticity. I am asking for everyday support. Fundamentally, I am asking for a home. I don’t have that now, now that I don’t see you during the week. I need home because my job is stressful, my social life is stressful, and I want to do so much on both those fronts. So I need a home, I need an emotional home. Right now, I don’t feel like I have an emotional home.
Am I going to adjust to this? To be honest, I don’t want to adjust to this. I’m going to have to commit less to the relationship, if this is to make sense for me. Right now it doesn’t make sense for me. Why are we together, if we’re not supporting each other in that way? Have we gone back to Dating? To Seeing Each Other? We’re not partners anymore, I can tell you that. We’re boyfriend and girlfriend, in the teenager sense of the word, in the a-couple-of-months sense of the word.
I used to think, thank God for you. I used to think, whatever else in my life, I’ve been lucky in love, you’re the best thing in my life. In a sense I know I still am lucky, because we enjoy each other’s company, and we love each other, and that’s difficult enough to find.
Would I rather be single? Of course I know if I broke up, I’d be devastated, I’d be depressed. But it would make more sense to me than what we have now. This doesn’t make sense. We don’t particularly share interests. We don’t really talk, during the week, neither do we during the weekend – we just don’t seem to connect on that level, or something (or you feel you can’t connect mentally with me, on that level, for privacy or whatever reason. That’s a problem too, in itself). The only thing we really had was companionship. There was nothing wrong with that, I loved practically living with you last year, we would connect mentally occasionally enough, and meanwhile we had the companionship to enjoy. But now we don’t have companionship, and that was our strongest suit.
What do we have? Why are we together, exactly? I can’t pretend I’m not having these thoughts. Emotionally, psychologically, I feel my own confusion, at the borders between week ends and week days. I feel myself thinking: what’s going on? I slightly shrink from your touch, on Fridays, and by Sundays I’m maudlin for you to not leave. I don’t like this. How is this acceptable to you? Even if it is acceptable for you, I’m not sure if it’s acceptable to me.
I wouldn’t say, let’s break up. Or rather, I wouldn’t say it now. But give me a couple of months more of confusion, I can’t promise how I will feel. I can’t promise that the lack of intimacy will eventually tip the scales for me and make me give it all up.
Is it possible to maintain the intimacy, while not living together? You tell me. I don’t know. All I know is, we’re not doing it. Part of the reason we’re not doing it is because this seems to be enough for you. That’s fine to an extent, you’re allowed to decide what you want for yourself. But so am I, so am I. And.. I don’t think this is enough for me. I’m pretty sure I require intimacy. I’m not getting it from you, and you don’t want me to get it from anyone else, like my girlfriends, while we’re together. This is a fundamental problem. This is making me miserable. This is making me miss home, this is making me miss my family, for the first time in more than four years, even though I never got along with any of them. This is making me think about going back to Australia, because if I had some semblance of family, it would matter less when my partner is not there to support me emotionally.
There would be ways for us to work this out. But I think, the fundamental problem is: it’s enough for you, but it’s not enough for me. What’s the point, you trying to appease me? If you don’t feel the need for intimacy, if you don’t have it with me, who am I to demand it? Who am I to think I could change you? If you don’t want intimacy, you don’t want intimacy. If you don’t trust me and want to talk to me, you don’t trust me and want to talk to me. It’s your prerogative, to not want to change that. If we had the companionship, maybe we could have worked on all that trust stuff later on at some point, when our careers were less demanding. But now that the companionship has been taken away, I’m not sure what else we have left to stand on. I’m not sure how long I can keep doing this. It’s deeply confusing for me, and it’s left me brittle in many other aspects of my life. It’s not that I don’t enjoy your company, it’s not that I don’t love you. It’s just that, I have no idea where we are. I don’t get the sense that you’re by my side. And if you’re not by my side, I don’t know what I’m doing here. I need to see to my own emotional needs, or I’m going to snap, or I’m going to continue like this, unable to enjoy life despite all the ways in which it’s objectively alright.
What is it exactly?
Fuck knows why I’ve been so unhappy lately. Is it just my imagination? Is it just my memory?
Is it the fact that someone who I was officially linked closely with, but whom I’d only known personally for a short period of time, has died? Is it the subsequent wrenching apart of what was a new beginning for me, in a certain configural context?
Is it the new professional environment, and the sudden impotence of my work self, in this new overwhelming situation, this new overwhelming environment? With no more any group to belong to, nothing really that I can see to justify my presence?
Is it the fact that I’m no longer living with my partner, is the removal of the comfort and security provided, by having someone to come home to at the end of every day?
Is it the subsequent relative estrangement, that has left me feeling more alone, and the rifts of late, followed by the realization that I am miles and miles and fucking a million miles away from my mother, who I’m slightly starting to think is the last person in the world who might ever love and support me unconditionally?
Is it the lack of social contact, the lack of community, the lack of belonging to a group of people with whom I can do mundane things like have a pint at the pub?
Is it my mother fucking menstruation? Is it stress from the job, the hard and anxious work with as yet no payoff, not even the sense of making a useful contribution?
I regret not writing more
I regret not writing more because it is only this once that I will get the chance to go through my early twenties. The majority of my teenage years are documented, and I can look back on my emerging self if I wanted. But my full adult self is still emerging, and it saddens me to think that for the poverty of memory I will likely not be able to, in the future, look directly into the experiences that are currently defining my person and my world view. It muddles my mind, a little, as well, to not be keeping track of the development, to not have a sense of where I am and where I’ve been, in my understanding of who I am or would like to be. And more than thoughtful self-awareness, it saddens me to think that there are the happiest of memories that I am living through right now that will not be accessible to me in the future, for the same reasons. It saddens me because I’ve had a lot of extremely happy times, and I want to remember them, not least when I start feeling sorry for myself, and when I start thinking that my more melancholic experiences are all I have.
