On Turning 25

I turned 25 last week. And then I got so depressed that I didn’t leave the house or talk to a single person in five days, except only to buy caffeine and food because I’ve been told that I need food to live and then I wrote way too much, none of it was good but I also now have so much caffeine in my body that I am pretty sure I don’t need love to live, romantic love, that is, just enough caffeine that will help me move my fingers from key to key on the keyboard to write words. Because I definitely need words to live.

Since posting the story online, I am afraid that I have made my heart public real estate now. And if you have ever written about all your ex boyfriends in a story before, then you know how much pain actually goes into reliving all of it, especially since I am drudging up stuff from 19 and 23 year old Amor. And of all the versions of myself that I have been, 19 and 23 year old Amor have been the saddest so far.

I was told by a very sweet, amazing French woman on my eight hour flight to Iceland that maybe I shouldn’t actually write the story anymore. We fell into the life conversation pretty quickly after meeting each other, even before our plane took off from LAX. She and I connected in a way that I knew we’d most likely talk for the rest of the flight over the United States and the Atlantic Ocean to the land of vikings and elves. She carried herself with the kind of grace and ease that I wanted to distill into myself. If she had a pill for me to to change my chemical makeup to give me that kind of grace, I would have taken it without hesitation. GIVE ME YOUR FRENCH ABILITY TO NOT GIVE A FUCK AND ALWAYS LOOK LOVELY AND BEAUTIFUL, PLEASE, I’d say as I dry swallowed the pill. We talked about her first husband and moving to the US when she was 18, we went through each other’s lives like a photo album, picking apart moments that changed us or showed us who we were at the time. She looked at me with her soft and deliberate eyes and said, “You don’t have to do it, if it hurts to write, don’t do it.”  

Trust me, I have thought about ending this story so many times, even when people texted me and told me how much they enjoyed the blog, even when people I admired read my work and said, “AMOR, THERE IS SOMETHING HERE. YOU’RE DOING IT,” even when friends told me that I was writing something of value, even when both of my parents told me I was a writer. (Which means the world to me, by the way, because my parents never sugarcoat anything ever unless perhaps they started to worry their daughter was on the precipice of insanity). But it hasn’t always felt good to press “publish,” because I knew the characters who helped shaped the narrative might one day read it too. And being even more vulnerable in their eyes felt like going through a breakup again, with each of them at the same time on the same page. And I couldn’t bare the idea of looking at them in the eyes and admitting that I had been trying to write this story all along and “What do you think? Is it good?” And writing is hard enough without having that metaphorical conversation with your exes. Writing can suck and I only feel good about admitting this because Amy Poehler talks about how shitty writing is in her preface of “Yes Please,” so now you know I am not wrong and that even talented, smart successful people hate writing too.

I am a slow learner. I don’t learn my lesson until months later, I have a habit for delaying the learning process, which is probably why I didn’t get why the poised French woman told me I could stop. It’s probably why an ex told me that I don’t have to make something my everything all the time in regards to my craft, to which I replied in a huff that he didn’t understand my passion and that he didn’t understand how badly I needed to write. In hindsight, he probably understood more than most. And it wouldn’t be the first time a stroke of passion would make me push people away. They were warning me. And I didn’t want to accept it. The days leading up to my 25th birthday, I became really obsessed with the idea of living with intent, mostly because I want this story to be purposeful, but in the process I got totally swept up by what the story could be construed by others, instead of what it means to me. So I got swept up by the pain of what I was doing and I could not leave my house until I thought that I could write something good, which in my mind, is never. Because every sentence started to sound clunky and immature and rudimentary and unoriginal and embarrassing. And then I worried that people wouldn’t understand that the story was not a “tell all” and that I was trying to create an arc and a narrative and that every choice was deliberate and then I feared I probably wouldn't have friends or be in love ever again now that my heart is on a website. But being highly critical of myself just made me cry in front of my parents and my grandma and by myself on a walk about how much of a terrible writer I was and then I just wrote nothing. And that’s not a healthy way of creating.

The story isn’t what I want it to be yet, it’s a fetus of the thing I want it to be, calculating and growing and trying to suck up all the experiences and infuse it into its DNA. I don’t know if it will ever become what I envision it when I plan out the arc of the story, maybe it doesn't have to. But I also have never felt so compelled to make this thing, even though parts of it are making it hard for me to feel ok again. On my 25th birthday, all I wanted to do was write. Actually, that’s a lie. I wanted to run away and write. I wanted to travel up the coast of California on my own and write in a coffeeshop and stay at an AirBnB and go hiking and listen to good music. I might be addicted to running away now; foreign places make me feel better than anything attached to a memory. Maybe because I am writing from memories, maybe because the conversations in my story are actually just thoughts now that have been tampered by time. My only reprieve from the past is being in a new place. And I think that is why all I ever want to do is go somewhere new.

I don't like pretty stories. I like messy things, I want the characters to be real and messy and lovable and fucked up. I want to see myself in every person, every character and understand them while I try to understand myself. That sounds weird. But that’s the kind of thing I am trying to create and I have no idea if I can do it and I don’t if I ever will, but I will try.

As an added punch, I am currently unemployed. At 25. I have a degree and a silly little blog with a few poems and a story that I am not sure will amount to anything and I don’t have a solid plan for my future anymore. I am going totally crazy in this limbo state in my life. I can’t even begin to tell you, though I guess you get the idea because this post is about three pages long now. I didn’t understand how much I needed work in order to have sanity. I mean, I have definitely made this blog my job, I definitely don’t feel like I have free time when any hour is a time I could invest in finishing the story I started. I have put in way more effort and hours trying to coordinate this site than I ever have at any line of work I have been paid to do, but I am not social anymore. In the past, I have always had a job to go to every single day, where I was forced to interact again and be part of other people’s lives and contribute. Or I had classes to go to, professors to consult my work with and students to get to know. But now the depressive episodes lend themselves to just staying home and writing and crying and being so alone that I start to think that maybe I don’t have to talk again and that maybe not talking will actually be good for me because I already feel very empty.. And ugh, I really hate that story. IT IS SO ANNOYING. 

I didn't write on my birthday though. I had breakfast with my mom, went to the mall to get makeup for going out, I went home and tried to edit, drank three glasses of wine, got so drunk that I posted little messages on my Snapchat my story about how grateful I was for my 24th year of life, I went out with my closest girlfriends, danced, wished I could just makeout with someone, not really wanting to, then really wanting to, saw my ex's Instagram picture (does he count as an ex?), wished I could be abroad again, realized I needed to write, talked with my friends until three a.m. and then went to bed in a king sized bed alone beside a fortress of pillows I mounted to feel warm like a person.  

So that brings me to the day after my 25th birthday when I became nearly comatose, declining invitations to hang out with friends and deciding I only wanted to read, write, watch movies, play guitar, rap and watch around 50 clips of “Would I Lie to You,” and the “Graham Norton Show” and applying for jobs that I am not qualified for and others that I am overly qualified for and being in a very weird limbo of “I need to do something of value.”  Some people will actually hate me for this, because I know how lucky I am to have this kind of freedom. I will get a job because I have no money and being 25 and bouncing from parent to parent’s house, sleeping on their couches or their beds when they are out of town isn’t what I need to be doing. And I know I will have an adventure and travel and write, because those are my priorities and I will make them that. But right now, is very limboesque. I guess it kind of feels like I am in the Upside Down from “Stranger Things,” I can see the world I need to enter, but I am stuck in this dark barren scary place at the moment without a real clue on how to escape. Since I have been back from my travels, I haven’t stayed in one place longer than five days. I don’t yet feel home anywhere, expect for when I am writing.

I knew that I was in shut down mode. I knew that something in me just completely turned off from the world the way it does every now and then when I go into the thing that I am now going to refer to as the “Upside Down.” And as someone who has suicidal ideation, I’d say there was a moment or two there when I wasn’t proud of the thoughts I had. And I am very ashamed of my depression. I am ashamed of my anxiety. Even though I’ve made them both public, I do carry shame with them and I hate that I have it and I don’t know how else to mitigate them. Because I don’t think it serves me and I don’t want something doesn’t serve me anymore. I don’t want to worry my family and friends. That’s not what this is, but I want that to be honest and real for someone who also feels in a total state of limbo and sadness that they can’t quite understand. Because every time I think I’ve conquered depression, it comes running towards me in the woods when I am alone and lost and looking for a light to lead the way. So far, 25 has been trying to find that light.