The Thoughts of a Weathered Soul...

The sun has risen and set on my thirtieth birthday and I stand at the beginning of a new decade. My thoughts race, as they often do, and the uncertainties of what lie ahead have me wishing for simpler times. My hiatus from the solace I find in the simplicity of a Word document has left me with emotional baggage that is threatening to exceed my cranial weight limit so I finally give in with hopes of purging the depths of my weathered soul.

I’ve gone from Chicago to Atlanta, from Atlanta to Baltimore, and from Baltimore to the beginning of a quarter life crisis. The unfamiliarity of my urban surroundings have me missing the consoling shoulders of friends that have married, gotten dogs, and begun to live out their lives by using sentences starting with “we” instead of “I.” I’ve come to a crossroads of sorts, feeling like subject matter for a John Lee Hooker song. I feel lost in space, wondering if the clarity I was searching for in my twenties will continue to elude me through my thirties. I wonder, often so, if I will ever discover the secret of NIMH in the rat race of life.

When January came to an end I celebrated my third year of sobriety. And although I was tremendously grateful for the gifts that it has given me, I celebrated it with a deep sense of discontentment because I feel like I have stopped evolving. My character defects seem to have resurfaced with a relentless fury as the man that I am trying to be and the man that I am seem to have reached an Old Western-esque impasse. I struggle with my own insanity lately, with the idiosyncratic nuances that comprise my uniqueness. I fight the lawlessness of a creative imagination that doesn’t stay chained to the present. I fight the monumental feelings of inadequacy I have from years of being “less than” and the fallout comes in the form of a tireless and static melancholy.

In A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway wrote, “The world breaks everyone ... those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.” I read his words and I don’t know if I am very good or very gentle or very brave. But I do know that lately I feel trapped in the world’s headlock and it’s getting so very hard to breathe. My vision slowly fades as the world tightens its hold and my mind flashes back to a different time, a time where I was young and fearless and where the silver lining of life was still polished. I miss staring at my shadow on sunny summer days and pretending I was twenty-two feet tall. I miss spinning the globe and stopping it with my finger and vowing I would someday go to where it landed. I miss the scared feeling I got when I thought about holding the hand of the girl I had a crush on.

But those times have changed.

Because life is constantly changing. The changing is constant. And the change that comes with the death of an entire decade has me yearning for the comforts that stability brings. So I fill my dishwasher and hang my pictures and curl up in my bed and do my best to infuse familiarity in foreign. But it’s hard. Because in addition to not knowing how to navigate the City of Baltimore, I’m not quite sure how to navigate my thirties. But I will put my best foot forward and continue to walk because the world has not broken me yet.

The world has not broken me yet.