March 2026 * 30
Some thoughts on a new decade
I turn 30 tomorrow. You, the reader, get to experience this sentence fresh while I’m back here on March 23 writing directly into the CMS (not really a CMS but still), seeing what comes to mind.1
Everyone has a birthday so none are all that special. Oh, to be alive at all or however that Neutral Milk Hotel song goes.
This is the kind of thinking I’ve been doing for a while.
I’m an only child and one of the first children born amongst my mom and her siblings, so the locus of family attention pleasantly shined down on me for many years. It became less pleasant when I was a teenager. I used to feel like an old soul in high school, less so today. As I approached my mid-20s, an equalizing feeling began to occur and now I wonder if I actually just felt 30. In which case, not an old soul because 30 isn’t old. (I have a 19 year old coworker and a 22 year old coworker and a 26 year old coworker who say otherwise.)
This is the solipsism of supposedly significant birthdays, the marking of progress and maturity by the milestone of age. That my debut novel is being published the same year I’m turning 30 is no small thing and I can’t wait to see how events play out (hopefully in a city near you; more on that in the coming months). But I effectively finished the book last year. I work at a bookstore, as I have for over a decade now. I still freelance. I don’t have healthcare. I still rent. I live within the same roughly three-mile radius of where I grew up, even after traveling extensively, moving away, and coming back.
People have asked me how turning 30 feels and the honest truth is, more of the same. That answer really has to do with my preoccupation to not talk about myself too much. For a long time, realizing how many things look the same in my life from the outside felt bad, as if nothing had changed. I used to be embarrassed by the idea that I moved back home after living in New York. This after spending so much of my high school daydreaming about escaping Vegas. Now, I’m grateful to be a writer associated with the southwest, that I’ve found stability here with Haley and our friends. It took me a while to realize that I’m not sacrificing any artistic ambitions despite the material limitations of my life right now, limitations that are by no means unique. The real reflection at this milestone is that I have more interest in being born in the first place.
I’ve been thinking of my parents and grandparents. Specifically how, until recently, I hadn’t seen that many older photos of them taken before I was born. The few I had seen, I was always the unifying context between each picture. But it makes the past, their past as much as if not more so than mine, seem so remote and mysterious. It is, in a way. I wrote an essay several years ago animated by this banal fascination with older pictures of my family. Trying to think myself into a different time and place. Trying not to assume too much based on what little I knew about certain relatives. Maybe trying too hard to grant them the ambiguity of a stranger’s life rather than the unquestioning familiarity one brandishes about a person you’ve been around your entire childhood.
Another way of putting this is, I like the initial effect the phrase “the past is a foreign country” has when I hear it, I just don’t know that I agree with it. It’s a bit tautological: If you think that phrase is true, it is, or will be. And there is a distancing effect that happens through refamiliarization. Seeing an old outfit, a building that’s no longer there, a face before it wrinkled and drooped. God, that hair. Those jeans. My nose. There are many ways to disassociate yourself from yourself and not all are bad. There can be an innocence in feeling untethered from your past and coming back to it in an image, or seeing someone who has always seemed old in their youth.
It’s not quite the same when it comes to old writing. At best, it’s funny to revisit. A few months ago, my dad was cleaning out his storage unit and dropped off a tub full of what I think are fair to call artifacts. Yearbooks. Trophies. Report cards. Drawings. There’s an undated, unfinished fiction project I dimly recall starting in middle school titled A Name Not Worth Knowing. This is the opening paragraph:
Have you ever wondered why you do the things you do? Every day something bad happens. Detective
TimothySeth Andrews, a man who practically never stops working, always finds a way to get out of trouble without killing himself. Today on January 8, 2019, he’s about to solvethea case that will change his life.
A noir written by a boy riffing on the gritty cop narration he’d seen in movies and on TV. For whatever reason, I used to be obsessed with naming characters Damien, even though I didn’t know anyone with that name and hadn’t yet watched The Omen. The killer’s name in my story is Damien, so the titular name not worth knowing is clearly someone else’s. The assistant police chief, which I’m fairly confident isn’t a real position, is named after my grade school prayer partner. I hadn’t thought about him until I copied out the above quote. At one point, the assistant police chief says, “OK, we have reported murders of a man who kills his victims from the inside, which I think is pretty damn interesting.”
I could not stop laughing. But I haven’t read past the first chapter yet. I don’t know what’s stopping me. It’s not embarrassment because almost every sentence I read is more nonsensical than the last. There’s something strange but moving about having this little sheaf of ripped-out notebook paper preserved. I think part of it is that I’m disappointed I never finished the story. It remains an incomplete thought, one that was clearly being developed as I wrote it, but now, as a document of personal history, frustratingly opaque. I wonder if either of my parents ever looked through my things and find it. I wonder what they thought.
At what point do you feel separate from your parents or your child? At what point do they feel like strangers?
But this is how it goes.
If you’re lucky, life includes taking a lot of good things for granted and then feeling stupid for thinking that’s okay. It’s meeting yourself, meeting your loved ones, meeting familiar faces again and again over the course of your life. I’m grateful to have made it this far, regardless of professional accomplishment or lack thereof. Increasingly, the real prize is a cliche: knowing and loving people who I am always excited to see and hear from, who I can help and who remind me that there’s dignity in admitting helplessness. People I adore, people who keep me up at night and make me forget about myself.
So happy birthday to Lady Gaga and Vince Vaughn and Julia Stiles and also me. I welcome any advice or reminiscences from readers about their 30th years. I hear it’s a better decade than your 20s which is, for me, a low bar to clear!
I leave you with a picture of me beheading Superman.
Cheers and more soon xx
When did Substack start calling these “articles”?