Settle In

So we stayed up late one night to try and get our problems right.

I was sitting on the bus, riding home from campus, scrolling through my Instagram feed when I realized that I had gone all week without feeling homesick for Toronto. It’s strange to phase in and out of connectedness. I live here now; I used to live in Toronto; I miss it; I haven’t thought about it in days. It felt like I had never lived here. I was so dissociated for all of my teenage years, it’s difficult to believe they actually happened. And now I’m back here again and the city is starting to feel real for the very first time.

I didn’t like the people in my program and then eventually I did. I remember when I was taking social psychology, like ten years ago, the professor talked about who a guy came to class every single day wearing a garbage bag, and at first it was like, “what a weird, off putting guy,” but then by the end of the semester, the students loved garbage bag guy. Was that a study or something that actually happened in one of the professor’s classes? I can’t remember. In my program, it was more like the various garbage bag people were blocking the nice ones from view and it took me a long time to track them down.

Tonight I went to a potluck with the ten of us who are doing the same specific focus. It’s what I imagined grad school being like: that kind automatic belonging with your cohort. One of the guys brought his guitar, a girl her fiddle. Two of the girls sang New Romantic, by Laura Marling. I watched them and I watched the room and then I watched myself watch the room. That’s like dissociation, I guess, but I don’t know how to experience something without also experiencing the process of experience it. Discursive institutionalists call that sentience.

I’m turning thirty in a week. My classmates asked me what I was going to do. I said probably just dinner with my family, nothing too exciting.

One girl said, “You should do what you originally planned. Do you remember what we talked about?”

I shook my head.

“You said you were going to go pick up young guys at a club.”

I laugh. “I said I didn’t want to go to a club and be a cougar.”

“And I said that you didn’t have to hit on younger guys if we went out.”

“Well,” I said.

I think the usual crisis of turning thirty is the achievement crisis, but I haven’t felt it. I’ve talked about it with other friends who already had their birthdays, how their lives aren’t where they imagined they would be at thirty. Maybe I should be feeling it more because I’m back being a student, but going back to school hasn’t made me feel any younger. I feel like a thirty year old who’s gone back to school. I’ve done a lot of things; those things counted.

Except then I’ll  feel like maybe those five years when I worked were just a dream. The entire closet in my second bedroom is full of blazers. I tried every single one on last night and they all looked terrible. My boobs are too big for blazers; it’s not a style of clothing that looks good on me. I have a whole closet full of clothes from another life and now it’s so obvious they don’t fit. I remember sitting in my office at work and thinking that I was going to start screaming because I felt so trapped and sad and bored. Office life is a fishbowl. Everyone else is just as bored and so they’re watching, always watching, and I always felt like the weird prawn trying to swim with the goldfish.

Going back to school is still full of all kinds of stupid conflict, but I just don’t feel upset like I used to. I think about how much I drank before, and how much pot I smoked. I don’t know how to reconcile the genuine happiness and connection I felt with the people around me with the number of nights I self medicated until I was numb enough to fall asleep on the couch while Netflix autoloaded the next episode of whatever show I was rewatching. I feel like I spent my late twenties becoming my most genuine self and also like I was a bad imposture muddling through someone else’s life.

I don’t know how to reconcile how nice my parents were when I went to their house for dinner last night with how horrible they were all summer. They didn’t end up getting divorced.

I was seventeen when I started my first degree. I was dating someone. My hair was sort of short. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. A couple of people from my class were saying that they were going to interview a woman for one of our assignments, and I realized I knew her. We had gone to high school together, and now she has the kind of position that grad students want to learn from. Thirteen years and I’m sitting in the same classrooms in the same university. I keep hearing the same names.

Coming back, it’s felt like time is a circle. I’ve never lived here before; I’ve never lived anywhere else. I was probably nineteen the last time I walked through the specific area I live in now. I didn’t have a specific idea of what my life would look like when I was thirty. I could never imagine myself married, I could never imagine having kids. I think I’m able to skip the Turning Thirty Achievement Crisis because I never had a strong idea of what I thought my life was going to look like. I just wanted to be happy.

Sometimes I think I’m happy.

More and more, these days.

I'm the first to admit that I'm still pretty young.