An ode to familiar times
I write this piece sitting in my kitchen somewhere in the obscure land of Chicago, Illinois.
I’m 23 years old going on 24 in just about 2 months. Each new year used to bring excitement, possibilities.
Now it brings something else: fear, anxiety, a general sense of unease. I’m not really sure how it got to this point.
Maybe it has to do with how the last few years have shaped up. I graduated college back in 2019, at the height of my “youth”. I subsequently moved back in with my parents and started looking for a full-time job, which kind of brought me crashing back down to earth.
Then the pandemic hit.
I’d say I’m luckier than most. My family and close friends have all escaped relatively unscathed. The move to work from home ended up benefiting me financially because I kept making the same amount of money while not having any reason to spend it. Writing this down makes me feel incredibly fortunate when so many did not have my same outcome.
So I’m not here to complain about my circumstances, I honestly am grateful for the place I am in life and can’t really ask for more.
What the pandemic did do to me was instill the foreknowledge of the unpredictability that comes with life. Especially during a time when I was already going to learn that anyway.
The world just stopped one day, and apparently, I stopped right alongside it. I grew to fear the world outside my door and it feels that the lockdown mindset has been ingrained into my psyche.
I used to wake up everyday enamored with all the possibilities that a particular day could bring, with all the free time in the world to choose any random I wished to follow.
I used to roll out of bed, text a friend I hadn’t seen in a bit, and go grab a lunch at a place I’ve never heard of.
The novelty of life, doing all sorts of things for the very first time, seems to be the root concept behind these past feelings of passion. Since then I’ve tried and failed of all sorts of things, each instilling me with various degrees of humility. I haven’t tried something for the first time in a while, I realize now, with my life kind of folding into a never-ending trap of monotony.
I used to think that this was part of getting older, that the bright lights of youth were to slowly fade as I put my head down to focus on taxes and mortgages. The pandemic and associated shutdown expedited that process substantially, with the world literally shutting me inside my home for my own good.
Writing this down is cathartic. This isn’t natural, nor should it be happening so soon. My greatest failure of all was a failure to believe in myself.
A failure to believe that I could be more than what I am today, that I still have the pluckiness and courage that defined me when I was 18 and left home for New York City. The same unadulterated excitement for life led me to solo backpack across the European continent when I was 20 years old. The same enthusiasm that has led me to rooftops I shouldn’t be on, friends I never thought I’d get to meet, love I’d only ever dreamed of experiencing.
I wrote a piece a few days ago about a drunken adventure through the night and getting the chance to relive that occasion filled me with such a degree of freedom and vivaciousness, something I haven’t felt in a very long time.
So here’s my ode to youth, a time I felt was behind me and only now realize is happening all around me, with or without my presence. I’ll inevitably have to let this spirit go someday to focus on some of life’s other endeavors, but for now, I’m gonna put my laptop down and go relish the life I still have yet to live.
Au revoir.
