In Process of Becoming:
Twenty-Seven at Twenty-Seven
I’m not a big birthday person. In fact, most birthday traditions are antithetical to my preferences. I don’t like parties or big crowds. I hate cake. I would rather give gifts than receive them. I usually do not like being the center of attention. The only thing I do every year on my birthday without fail is simply cook and eat an entire lobster for dinner.
Instead of celebrating my birthday the conventional way, I prefer to treat the day as if it were the start to a new year, by reflecting on my previous year and setting goals for the next one. This is, technically, my new year, after all.
This annual reflective process always starts with a peek backwards.
Those who know me well know that I am an avid journaler — I have been for well over a decade now, since the birthdays were still in the single digits. Journaling is, for me, not only a way to document and archive my life, but it’s a way to track my individual growth and learnings, and to work through the seemingly never-ending inner turmoil that naturally accompanies existence.
At least once a year, I will read through a couple select journals to remind myself of who I was, acknowledge who I am, and decide who I want to be.
Since I am a documentarian at heart, this process often involves annotations, notes, and many colors of highlighter. I’ll take scrap paper and write down my thoughts and responses as I re-read previous versions of myself, and will then synthesize that into key lessons, takeaways, and things to work on.
I figured I’d share a few of these fortune cookie-esque lessons I’ve accumulated over the years. They span a range of topics and situations, and are in no particular order. Some have been harder to learn than others, some of them I am still in the process of learning, but I hope you find them useful, or at the very least interesting.
That being said, I may disagree with these by next year, who knows. I will continue to learn and grow, as we all do. Twenty-seven could look very different from twenty-six, or it could look exactly the same. The self is dynamic and ever-changing, and these lessons only demarcate me in a current place and time. To quote anthropologist Tim Ingold, “the path, and not the place, is the primary condition of being, or rather of becoming.”
And so, here are twenty-seven lessons from my path of becoming thus far:
1. Heartbreak is often worth it.
2. Your worth is not tied to your productivity. Capitalism wants you to hate yourself. Don’t let it succeed.
3. Do not base your self worth on how others feel about or perceive you.
4. Whitman was right — we do indeed contain multitudes. They are simultaneously vast and narrow, and attempting to siphon them down into one is futile — embrace them.
5. Falling for someone’s potential is just falling in love with your own imagination.
6. Being low maintenance does not mean letting people cross your boundaries.
7. The self is not innate. Robert Penn Warren said, “in the phrase, ‘to find myself,’ lurks the idea that the self is a pre-existing entity.” You do not “find yourself,” you “become yourself” — you are a curation of your own experiences.
8. Make enemies. If you “get along with everyone” and wonder “why we can’t all just be friends,” you have no backbone and arguably no moral compass. Sorry not sorry.
9. Vulnerability is not letting people into your home; it’s letting people in when you haven’t cleaned or showered. It’s letting people see your true, raw self — unfiltered and un-vacuumed and unperformed.
10. Wisdom is not determined by age, nor is intelligence ascribed to level of education.
11. You will exhaust yourself trying to control the outcome. It will never be how you imagine, so let it go. Detach. What will be, will be.
12. Compartmentalizing your life is hard and not worth it.
13. Look back on the previous iterations of yourself with kindness and grace, not shame and embarrassment.
14. In one of his journals, Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “there is no terror like that of being known.” But no one other than yourself can truly know you. Others can only perceive you, just at varying depths. Be your own best friend first.
15. Grief is evidence of love. It does not dissipate. You just learn to live with the loss.
16. You do not need to forgive everyone, especially if your apology would only be to remediate a situation or alleviate guilt. Stand your ground.
17. There is no formula to match the severity of trauma to the recovery time needed. Take it one day at a time and do not compare your progress to others.
18. Remaining hopeful in the midst of precarity is not naivety, it is resilience.
19. It is ok to be wrong — how you handle it, acknowledge it, and learn from it is what matters.
20. The line between stubbornness and determination is paper thin. Choose your battles wisely.
21. Hyperindependence leads to isolation. It’s ok to want to be taken care of sometimes. It’s ok to ask for help — people want to be helpful. You are not a burden.
22. Do not wait around for someone who isn’t ready for you. Don’t waste your time on false promises. In longing for an ideal future, you lose the beauty that is the present moment.
23. You can love yourself and still be lonely. You can love your own company and still crave companionship.
24. Interspecies bonds can be richer than intraspecies ones. Having strong interspecies bonds does not make you a weird Eliza-Thornberry-wannabe; it highlights your capacity for empathy and understanding.
25. People will tell you they want you and not mean it. It is a reflection of them, not you. (Knowing that does not remove the devastation that accompanies this situation, but it helps).
26. The ability to curate community is a gift. Cherish it.
27. Just because people stick around does not mean they’re right for you or that the connection is healthy — this applies to any relationship, whether it be platonic, romantic, or sexual. Loyalty does not necessarily beget synergy.