I’m in the midst of something. Not a crisis. Something less dramatic. A funk, maybe. I think it all started about three weeks ago.
I was running errands one afternoon, and ended up in my college town. I decided to take a detour and drive through campus, which–despite being only 25 minutes from my current apartment–is something I haven’t done since graduation.
The campus has grown and changed so much, but driving through it felt like muscle memory. It felt impossible to get lost. Every turn I took, every curve in the road, every poorly marked crosswalk jolted my memory. I suddenly remembered the names of streets I hadn’t driven or thought about in almost seven years. I saw students scurrying out of the lobby of my freshman dorm, books in hand. It must’ve been finals week. Ten years prior I was in that building studying for my first finals week. That was the week I became a coffee drinker. A whole decade ago. I stared at the window of my old dorm room. I could visualize the 18-year-old version of myself inside. Her hair is box-dyed a dark brown, likely tied up in a messy bun. She’s sitting too close to her laptop screen–a bad habit that will eventually take a toll on her eyes. Her first pair of glasses is just three years away. She’s sipping an oversized cup of coffee that she’s dumped too much sugar into–an addition to her drink that she will eventually, and thankfully, cut out. In a few hours, she’ll take a break from whatever paper she’s writing to go to the diner with a friend she keeps swearing is just a friend–she doesn’t know yet that that’s a lie.
There are a lot of things she doesn’t know. In some ways, I envy her. She is a type of carefree that you can only be at 18. She is blissfully naive. Selfish, in a mostly innocuous manner. Impulsive, in a sometimes innocuous manner. She has so much to look forward to. She hasn’t even met some of her very best friends. She’s going to fall in love! She’s going to move to New York! She’s going to get bangs!
This version of Cate doesn’t feel so distant, but I feel incredibly removed from her. She appears in my mind like a projection on a screen. She’s right there, but I can’t feel her. I can remember how she felt in terms of adjectives: stressed, tired, nervous. But the actual feeling is inaccessible. For a moment, I thought I might cry, but I wasn’t entirely sure why.
Two weeks after my campus drive, I met up with a friend I met in my freshman year dorm who remains one of the most important people in my life. We sat side-by-side at a bar for hours, sipping wine and giggling, cozy and protected from the rain pouring down outside. Her boyfriend–another treasured human in my life–eventually joined us.
“Maybe 2024 is the year I fall in love again,” I said to them both.
“Or maybe,” he paused to sip his martini. “It’s the year you fall in love with yourself.”
“No,” she whipped her head towards him. “She did that this year.”
Perhaps it’s the emotions of the holiday season, my lingering feelings from my trip down memory lane, or the fact we’re on our second (third?) bottle of wine–but for a moment, I again feel like I might cry. I’m bubbling with gratitude for these friendships. I remember a compliment she gave me earlier in the year. One of the best I think I’ve ever received. “The current version of Cate is my favorite version of Cate.”
On Christmas day, I learned that I’m going to be an aunt in just a few months. Huge, amazing news that left me feeling nothing but warm and fuzzy inside. But, as days went by, I realized the announcement was further stirring up whatever feelings had already been festering in my mind. Only a few years prior, in that same college town, I was in a dive bar racing my brother to see who could chug a pitcher of Natty Boh faster. That guy is going to be a dad with a real, live kid. I am going to be an aunt. My parents are going to be grandparents. Just like the afternoon on my college campus the week before, I felt suddenly very aware of the passage of time.
I expressed these feelings to a friend over dinner last night. She asked me if I thought my internal reaction was a result of feeling like some sort of responsibility or obligation came with my new title. That wasn’t it, I told her. I talked in circles for a bit while I tried to unravel the web of seemingly contradictory feelings dancing around in my brain. I finally landed on a coherent thought. I feel as if I received a promotion I’m unqualified for. As a kid, I always viewed my aunts, uncles, parents, grandparents as adult people who felt like adult people and knew how to handle this whole life thing like adult people should. “I think what it is,” I said to her. “Is that I’ve realized no one ever really knows what the fuck they’re doing.”
On New Year’s Eve, an old, familiar friend came to visit: that panicky feeling. I wasn’t all that surprised given that I had been grappling with a sudden, acute awareness of the passage of time, and this was a night entirely devoted to marking that passage. I was wearing a sequin dress and standing against a wall in a dimly lit bar–looking too cute for a bout of extreme anxiety, honestly. I could feel the panic sitting on my chest. It felt tangible. Thick and sticky–like mud on a shoe. I wanted to open myself up and rinse it away. A drink and a few deep breaths later, it diminished a bit.
Later that night, I was surrounded by family and friends in that same bar watching my brother’s band perform. In the excitement of their set, midnight came and went without a countdown. They did a belated countdown two minutes into the new year. I turned to my dad. “Eh, whatever,” I said. “Time is a construct anyway.”
I think again of the 18-year-old version of me, drinking her sugar coffee in her tiny dorm room, pulling all-nighters instead of just starting her paper when her professor told her to. I decided I wasn’t envious of her. The next ten years would hand her some really tough moments. She has no clue. And while I know that those hard moments will be really hard, I don’t want to protect her from them. If I could warn her in some Back To The Future-esque way, I wouldn’t. There will be times where she feels so broken. But she’ll figure it out and she–I–will continue to figure it out.
At this moment, I am somehow simultaneously exactly the same as I’ve always been and entirely different than I ever was. I am, like everyone else, a product of the emotional and physical wear and tear of life–somehow both a little bit more fragile and a lot a bit stronger. I am often confused, uncertain, and unbalanced. I am sometimes unkind and unfair to myself and others. I am learning, slowly, to recognize that these things are not blemishes on my identity, but important pieces of it. I am more whole because I’ve been broken. And that’s all I know right now.
I can't find a pen 