Thirty-One

I'm 31 years old today, I am not exaggerating when I say for a while I wasn't sure I would make it this far.  If you've read my other blog chronicling my health journey you'll have some insight into what I went through and the thoughts that went through my head during that time.  Nevertheless, here I am.  I am happy to be saying goodbye to 30, it wasn't a good year for me, my 20s ended badly when this whole health journey began, but on the bright side it has meant that my 30s starting on a low point has actually made me feel quite optimistic about the rest of the decade.

Age is a strange thing to me, I'm conscious of it, and I do think about it, but my feelings toward it aren't the same as others as far as I can tell.  I see many people who dread growing older, who don't want to admit their age, and who try to hold on to their youth insofar as lying about their age to try and remain young.  I never really got the point of any of that.  My only anxiety when it comes to the idea of growing older is knowing that a number of health problems will get worse as I get older which I don't want to think about, and the reality that the older I get, the closer I become to losing some of the people I love who are older than me.  As for ageing itself, that never really bothered me if I am completely honest.

I was born an albino, so my hair is naturally white, it turns blond if certain chemicals discolour it or if I am in the sun too much, so I never really had to worry about the idea of going grey with age.  I've seen more than a few guys around my age who are greying and their visible signs of ageing are providing the only visible reminder I can really see that I am getting older.  I look to other people a lot in order to try and gauge where I would be by now if I wasn't albino.

As for mentality, I was old before my time, there are many reasons for this which we won't get into right now as it's some pretty heavy reading.  Being old before your time however, you would think you would stay that way and other people would simply catch up to you, but in my experience that isn't what happens, in fact I think the reverse is more common - that you tend to adopt a younger and younger mentality as you age whilst others grow in theirs.  I've not only observed this in myself, but in a number of other people who have told me stories about what they went through in their lives, the same desire to make up for lost time seems to assert itself.  You find comfort and solace in exploring things that are completely new to you with the mentality of a teenager once more.  People often talk about having a second childhood, for me personally I would say I've had more than two by now, I've gone through several phases now where I have become obsessed with things that aren't aimed at adults at all.  Music, Games, TV shows, Movies, etc, things that are explicitly marketed towards teenagers often have much more appeal for me than anything that's actually marketed toward people of my age - most of that stuff is actually boring to me.

This does go somewhat further into denial or avoidance of "life goals" or "milestones" that you're expected to have achieved by now - this at least I can't contribute to my specific experience as I believe this is something that is common to my generation as a whole, in many ways we are a "correction" to borrow a term from the world of finance.  In financial markets when stocks grow in value over time that growth eventually stretches to the point where the perceived value and the actual value has diverged too far, at that point what is referred to as a correction occurs, where the price crashes suddenly until it moves closer to reality before it starts to grow again.  I believe my generation is a correction, whereby other generations that came before us pursued growth at all cost and built up expectations to such extremes that they diverged too far from reality, the result is that a correction has occurred where reality has been asserted and expectations have been brought back down to something much more realistic - my generation has almost entirely abandoned the expectations and ideals of those that came before us writing them off as fantasy.

What all of this has got to do with me personally is the realisation that the value that I attribute to my own achievements needs to be determined by me alone, by my expectations, and by my goals, not by anyone else's.  To that end, I have been looking back at my life so far and all that I have done and I've been feeling much better about it than I have for a long time.  I am a published author, I had the education I wanted, I have been in various jobs and learned a lot from those experiences, I've lived without money, I've lived with money, I've spent everything, I've saved everything, I've learned how to find a balance between extremities.  I'm still alive, despite how close I have been to death so many times that I know its face better than my own. 

I've said many times, I don't know what I want to do with my life, and that is still true.  Right now as ever, all I want is to be happy, and I recognise to find happiness in the moment doesn't take much.  I don't know what life has in store for me, and to be honest I don't think I want to know before it happens.  I feel like I am alive for a reason, I have no idea what that reason is, but I am at least interested to know the answer, that is, if I ever will, I may never know why I was meant to live, or what affect I had on other people simply by being alive, butterflies and all that.