Autumn Years

I think about time a lot, specifically I think about how much time has passed between two points. I spend a lot of time reflecting on my life, part of the journey you take as someone with anxiety and depression eventually leads you to that point of reflection. When I measure time I tend to think of it as if a child had been born in that moment and how old they would now be. I attended college from 2004 to 2006, it being 2022 now that marks 18 years almost to the day.

I remember my first day of college with clarity for a number of reasons. We had recently moved house and our post was still being redirected. I knew I had been accepted to the college in question but I did not know the start date of my course, I was waiting for that to arrive. I remember my Mum waking me up one morning in September to tell me a letter arrived from the college. Half asleep I opened the letter and read through blurred vision and that grogginess you feel when you're woken from a deep sleep. It was 12:30 and that grogginess didn't last long as panic set in, I was meant to start that morning. I made it to college that afternoon and the course director was understanding, they had wondered why there was no reply to the letter as there was paperwork I was supposed to complete. Everything worked out in the end and the next two years were two of the happiest years of my life despite some very sad moments in their midst.

It has been 18 years now since that day, and true to form, my mind frames this gap in time with the realisation that there are now 18 year olds that weren't even born yet - give or take a few days. It's a very strange realisation to come to when you don't think of yourself as old. I'm 34 years old, I started college at 16 - that in itself is sobering to realise more time has now passed since that day than my entire life up until that point.

When you're a child you tend to think of "adults" as people who look "old" to you, but your perception of age doesn't let you accurately judge how old they are. In time you come to gain a greater understanding and you start to divide up the population into stages of life and place expectations on those stages as to what you think someone that age would have achieved. You gain a basic understanding that anyone in the first age bracket will be at your school, and the next bracket is the next level of education and so on, until you get to adulthood - which in the UK is generally considered to be 18. You build up this expectation that someone 18+ will be focused on their career, or having a family, owning a home, or some other aspiration usually linked in some way to the perception of wealth and success - which to some people are one and the same.

Everything slowly changes however as you grow older. That idea that everyone over 18 has life figured out, slowly slips away. You stop thinking of the people who are older than you as having greater maturity and begin to realise that age doesn't guarantee maturity at all. There's something to be said here about stunted adolescence and second childhoods and all the rest apropos people in general, and more to be said for those who identify as LGBTQIA+, as a gay man that one touches a nerve, and of the millennial experience, which again touches a nerve although surprisingly not as deep. There's something to be said but I don't have the intellectual capacity nor the emotional dexterity to eek out a coherent string of thoughts on that particular bent.

The key point though is that your perception shifts and you stop thinking of what you expected people that age to be and instead start thinking of what you are. For some people this leads to comparison of the self with others in their peer group - I don't count myself as one of those people. I never quite felt like I belonged in society, part of that was because I grew up as a closeted gay guy in a society I perceived to be deeply conservative because of the political regime that dominated the discourse I was exposed to through media and life experience during my formative years. Part of it however was solely down to the fact that I always had interests that didn't gel with the people around me. For all said against the internet, if I had it to the extent that it exists today during my childhood I would have felt less alone in the world, but I can't change that.

I've accepted quite a lot about myself in terms of who I am and what I want from life, but the trouble is often times the only thing I want is to be happy and for most of my life I was able to find moments where I could feel that and feel content. I went through many dark nights of the soul and come through storms where there was no hope and no light to be found anywhere except buried deep inside myself. I'm in a weird state of mind right now, where I'm slowly starting to feel something again and I don't know how to kindle that without smothering it in the process.

There's also the temptation to hide that meagre semblance of joy from the world because the world has a remarkable way of throwing an endless stream of negativity and despair at you when it reacts to even the faintest glimmer of hope. There's a type of monster in the Kingdom Hearts series of games called a Heartless that is perhaps better described as a Cold Heart, that is drawn to the warmth of happiness and joy. That allegory feels quite fitting when I think of the world as it stands. I don't expect the world to change, I think the desire to change it is the crusade of the young. If you discard the age brackets and think of life instead as seasons, your childhood is the Spring when you learn and grow the most; your adolescence and "young adult" years mark the Summer when you bask in the light of the world and either find happiness or get burnt to a crisp, or fall somewhere in between.

I'd consider myself now entering the Autumn of my life, if you divide your life into 18 year seasons then most people wouldn't enter their Autumn years until they were 36, and Winter at 54. 72 onward I would consider your "second Spring" partly because of the change in people I know who reached that age and the shift in priorities that seems to happen like clockwork.

So what does Autumn mean? It's easy to be melancholy and say it represents the decline and decay of the bounty but that's not how I see it. Autumn is the Harvest Season, the time when you reap the rewards of what you have laboured over up to that point, but for a Millennial with few job prospects, who never married, never had kids, and never sold their soul to capitalism, what does that entail? I think it has to start with being realistic about what you want from life. When I was in High School one of the books we read for English Literature was Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller; the novel based on the play was the first instance I can recall of being introduced to the idea of a pipe dream and the idea of nostalgia seducing the mind into listless reminiscence of halcyon days.

I think as you grow older, you naturally accrue dreams of what you want to achieve, but having many dreams that pull you in opposing directions does nothing except root you to the spot. Being realistic about what you want from life I think has to start with taking stock of all those things and sobering up to the reality of whether or not you want to pursue them and what that actually involves. If the idea becomes more concrete then put greater effort into achieving it. If the idea is unrealistic then I think you have to begin the process of accepting that fact and letting go of the idea you're ever going to do it.

I've written about that concept in the past, it's essentially the Marie Kondo method only applied to your mind, both in terms of thought and memory. I don't necessarily believe that everything you choose to keep has to spark joy, but I think the triste felt by reflecting on unachieved goals and dreams beyond your reach needs to be "audited" for lack of a better word. I am acutely aware of the connotations of that word and what it can specifically refer to, and while I do not prescribe to the idea of giving all your wealth to someone else in the search of happiness, I think it's important to understand that there are some truths to everything in life, no matter how warped it may become beyond that foundation, it is that foundation that attracts those who pursue it.