The Bland, Gray Porridge of the Past Decade

severe elevation | high elevation | moderate elevation | slight elevation | normal | slight depression | moderate depression | deep depression | severe depression || anx : 1 , agit : 1


I had a chat with my brother recently about how his friends from high school have aged and so forth. I met most of his high school friends and it was fun talking about them again, even if I don't quite know how they look like nowadays. He filled in the blanks about who gained weight and who lost hair, who got married, who went to live abroad and other interesting details of what occurred in the past decade.

In that conversation, there was something my brother said that resonated in my soul: He said, casually and unaffectedly, "Hmmm .. I don't know where the past ten years went."

Funny; I agreed with him. I really feel the same way.

It's as if my life until age 21 had been a roaring cornucopia of various colors and flavors, while everything else since then had muddled into a bland porridge of gray. I can look back fondly and with much interest at my young years, even though they were full of pain and trauma; but when I reminisce on my twenties, it's as if there's hardly anything there, like every day was just the same dull flavor. I supposed it was because I had too much life (not necessarily fun or good) as a teenager, and then due to certain details in my family background I felt the urge to grow up and get serious earlier than I should have.

I recall that's exactly what I forced myself to do - grow up and get serious after twenty. I ditched my artsy, full-of-personality garb and took on a pathetic attempt to be a responsible human being. I toted a boring, black filofax in exchange for my wild journals and sketchbooks. I cleaned up, went into an internship program, got married and got a job. I played adult because that's what people over twenty do. I wanted to make a decent, fulfilled life for myself.

And when I look back - as I told my brother - everything in the past ten years was just about working, working, working. The same mucky gray porridge every single day of the decade. Now that I've quit my job I see how I probably could have wasted the past ten years of my life in the pursuit of being a "mature, productive adult citizen". But then again, I can't imagine doing it any other way - money had to be earned, food had to be bought, bills had to be paid and work had to be done. That vicious cycle in a salaried man's life.

I considered the possibility that this may be how a lot of people feel when they hit the line of 3. But then I did a little survey of sorts among my friends and their answers vary. Some of them only began to have that cornicopic sense of existence in their mid-twenties, when they began to earn, and were free from their parents and beginning to experiment with all sorts of things (Huh. Admittedly , I started experimenting early and got bored of it early). One friends answered that age 30 is so far the best year of her life, now that she has kids. So I guess it isn't about age but really the content of the years.

I feel like I've grown up too soon, and i sometimes wish that I hadn't . But on the other hand, if i hadn't, I 'd be like my friends who are still living with their parents and acting like college kids way past their 25th birthday. I 'm not sure what'd be more disgusting - being 35 at 25, or 15 at 25.

I'm thinking about how I could and should make my like fuller and more productive now. But then there's that nagging sense of what if. In my decision to become something with perfectly good intent and sound planning, things might flub up again and result in another decade of gray porridge because I forced myself to have a good life. Sigh. Only time will tell.