Growing up

End of year dispatch from my bedroom floor

Last fall, I started this Substack with the premise that I’d write about dropping out of college and moving back in with my parents at 21. I did manage to get a couple coherent essays out - one about a strange relationship in college, one about blowing off work for a particularly magical solo trip to Montréal - but once I moved at the end of the year, they quickly devolved into short, choppy posts that read more like an exercise in meaninglessness. It turns out that there is not much to write home about when you’re already living at home.

Every December, there’s always an engagement-bait tweet floating around demanding to be quote retweeted with what everyone accomplished over the year. The people in my life who I love accomplished major things this year: many of my friends finished their degrees and started grad school, one landed a book deal, several moved to new cities to pursue their careers. Those who didn’t do something life-changingly big are still on upward trajectories. I’m always in awe and more than a little jealous of all my friends - beautiful people with big, beautiful passions and dreams, propelling themselves into lives that I have to remind myself are not closed off to me, even though sometimes it feels like I’ve irrevocably fallen behind.

I did not accomplish anything of note this year. Most of the time I feel like I’m stagnating, plagued by avolition. I spend a lot of time sitting on the yoga mat on my bedroom floor. One of my friends mentioned how he hasn’t been able to enjoy playing video games in the past few years and that clarified something for me, in that it feels like my reward center has gone entirely offline. I think that the work I’ve done this year has been in becoming a better and more palatable person - when I first moved home, I had no control over my abrasive and often unpleasant personality, which resulted from the 6 months preceding my move (during which I rarely spoke to anyone and typically ate one egg for lunch and one can of Amy’s low sodium low fat soup for dinner). Most of the time I felt like I was readjusting to normal human life after being released from solitary confinement. My life in Halifax was good until it wasn’t, and then it was very bad, and I think that I’ve spent most of this year undoing some of the damage.

Last year was extremely strange (example: my boyfriend took me to adopt a cat one week after we started dating) and extremely unbearable (ex. I had to interview potential adopters after we broke up and I no longer had the financial or emotional capacity to take care of the cat). I moved home immediately after December finals, which I studied for with my laptop propped up on boxes in my bare, packed-up room, in a haze of heartbreak and receding agoraphobia and malnourishment. A couple nights before I moved, I went out with some friends at the bar near my apartment that we frequented for years, and what I remember from that night is that I had a huge pimple on my forehead and I also somehow wound up completely drenched with beer. On my last morning in Halifax, my ex-boyfriend took me for breakfast, packed my suitcases and my guitar into the back of an Uber, and kissed me goodbye. I must have been listening to the Mountain Goats when we drove over the bridge. I can’t remember crying but it’s safe to assume I did given that I cried almost every day of 2022.

This year has also been full of heartbreak and change and crisis and many of these things have been objectively far more devastating and unexpected than anything that happened last year. I have also felt, for the first time in my life, completely grounded in myself and able to adjust and deal with grief in a normal human way. I’m always hesitant to pathologize emotional responses, but an aspect of PTSD is that it tends to warp how you respond to stress. In some cases, like when you have no social support and all your emotional resources are depleted, this means that something upsetting but otherwise normal can trigger months of depression, neuroses, feeling like you’re trying to move underwater, like your head is full of static. It is completely irrational. It is very isolating. It has taken a while to get to the point where I can see it for what it was.

Maybe from the outside it looks like I’ve moved backwards this year: I gave up my degree in neuroscience, a lab position that I loved, an office job that paid more than minimum wage, an apartment with bay windows and scallions growing in mason jars in the kitchen, a life I’d carved out for myself. I moved back in with my parents and took a semester off (during which I did not read every novel by Dostoevsky or learn German or start crocheting, all things I wrote in my notes app as “to do on your gap semester”). I transferred to a school which requires me to take a fifth year, I changed my field of study to something that doesn’t sound nearly as impressive as neuroscience, and I failed to get any work whatsoever. When I lived in Halifax, something that bothered me all the time was that all the boxes were checked but I was still so miserable. I cried every day and I didn’t understand what was wrong with me. After I broke up with my boyfriend I called my mom and said something along the lines of but I was so happy, and she said, but you called me crying every day of it. In 2023 if I’ve accomplished anything it’s that I trust myself now, unconditionally, without judgement, even when I fail to meet the standards I impose on myself, even when doing what’s really and truly good for me means feeling like I’m falling behind everyone else. I’ve learned that there is always a way out. If you are deeply unhappy, you can drop out and move back in with your parents, and it will not ruin your life.

Notes on 2023 from scrolling through my notes app:

• D and I went to M’s show at Bampot and sat outside between sets on the wet benches with a group of girls who we’d just met - smoking cigarettes, hiding beer cans from the bouncer - they told us about friends who’d just moved into an apartment in the house next to Margaret Atwood’s - apparently she’s a hoarder, they said, she always leaves a pile of junk on the curb

• Plastic wrapped bagel on the train to Montréal with J - I accidentally pay $50 for an NYT Games subscription

• We get lost trying to find the third floor of the art gallery - at the book fair, we drift and collide, D reads in Latin, I fawn over old copies of Aesop’s Fables - later I get coffee and a bagel and I sit on M’s couch and listen to them play guitar - I’m reading Margery Kempe, I haven’t done any work today, it’s fine, we buy beer, drink it on the floor and watch Texas Chain Saw Massacre - none of us want to go to the party later

• J and I walk from the Neue Gallery through Central Park to a coffee shop past the subway - we talk about how we could be happy really anywhere, in any city, provided we had a job that paid reasonably well and made us reasonably not miserable, and provided we had friends in that city - I no longer take this for granted, no longer accept loneliness as a given

• I’ve come here almost every day this semester to study and to have coffee but we never sit at the table by the window - today we do - it snows for the first time this winter

• 5 am on the floor in their kitchen drinking tea and J says, in the next few weeks something major and good is going to happen to all of us. I could use something good but I think I already have it, it’s this, of course it is

Lawren Harris. Houses, Richmond Street, 1911. I love how he paints Toronto. I love being back home. I missed it so much. xo