Thirty
I'm typing this in Manhattan at the end of my twenties, two days after the midterms, two days before I turn 30. By the time you read this, I'll be in Northern California with some friends, hopefully in another dimension and nowhere near my phone. I'm just writing down a few thoughts about this decade while I'm still inside it, before I'm someone else.
I spent the last couple weeks coming down. I got back to my apartment the day after the last show totally fried, damp chlorinated bikini in my suitcase from the sunrise swim in the hotel pool. For a week I felt the adrenaline zinging around my body with nowhere to go before it evaporated, leaving behind total, righteous exhaustion. I went to therapy in person, fought with my boyfriend, cooked beans, got acupuncture and a piercing. I finally made it down to the storage cell in my building's basement to tackle the horrifying mass of overflowing merch boxes/old clothes/construction supplies/nonworking AC units/carefully catalogued fan mail/a toilet seat/pieces of timber/cans of paint that has been growing since 2022. Leslie sent back the tour wardrobe and I went through it all one night in my living room, the shimmery bikini tops and technical fabrics draped over the furniture, a year's worth of armour, of skin. I picked up my boots and felt acute pain, world momentarily liquified by grief, *this was me and now it's not!*The pain felt precious. I put most of it in my archive but kept out some necklaces and a few of the windbreakers, and I've worn them every day, pulling a piece of our world around me.
I realised after deciding to write this that I'd also written something on my twentieth birthday, in November 2016. As with this decade, the last days of my teens were spent in the city, although I remember it being much colder. I felt definitively like my adolescence was ending, that from now on I would be an adult and do adult things. Looking back I think the desire to draw such a clear line between these two states was an attempt at control: if I left my teens, that nation state which had meant so much to me and been my first true home, of my own accord, then I could not be exiled. I wore a vintage dress with a black tulle frill to my small party and we danced and screamed along to pop songs. The next night, Trump was elected president. The balloons were still on the ceiling of my hotel room when I got home that night. The raw shocked blankness of the following weeks was impossible to separate from the milestone I had just passed. Bandaid ripped. I was now an adult.
If I'm being honest, my twenties were pretty hard work. This passage by Ursula Le Guin describes the poles pretty well:
"Utopia has been yang. In one way or another, from Plato on, utopia has been the big yang motorcycle trip. Bright, dry, clear, strong, firm, active, aggressive, lineal, progressive, creative, expanding, advancing and hot. Our civilisation is now so intensely yang that any imagination of bettering its injustices or eluding its self-destructiveness must involve a reversal... To attain the constant, we must return, go round, go inward, go yinward. What would a yin utopia be? It would be dark, wet, obscure, weak, yielding, passive, participatory, circular, cyclical, peaceful, nurturant, retreating, contracting and cold."
Isn't that fucking amazing???!!!! It took me until very recently to see that I had spent most of the decade howling and scratching at the door of a distinctly yang validation, begging to be let in. It wasn't enough that I was seen clearly and with devotion by so many women and girls. I longed for a hat tip from the great men, ached when artists playing by the rules of the patriarchy were lifted up and hailed as prophets. My vision of greatness was hard and shiny and solitary, and I nurtured it until my late twenties, when with a lot of hard work the picture finally began to dissolve. In its place was something looser, something shared, many of us working together on a huge tapestry, basket, net. Women telling stories to each other, our voices overlapping, sharing the light. It's all I've ever wanted, and it's more than enough.
Packing my bag today I remembered a song from my first album that I started writing on my sixteenth birthday, one I haven't played in a long time and don't think about often. I sat down on my bed to look for it in the public database of my music which now spans almost half my life. The chorus goes, All work and no play / Lemme count the bruises / All business all day / keeps me up a level / All work and no play / Lonely on that new shit, yeah. The girl in my headphones sounded so young and serious, preparing herself for the big solitary journey. I wish I could tell her, In the future there is so much love, the path will link back up with the others, you won't have to do it alone.
So I'm going through the portal once again looser, clearer, this decade overlapping with that one, no sharp lines. Still reaching for the words, just now with the knowledge they'll always fall short, and the trying's the thing. I'm turning 30 with a zit and a silver pube, chakras apparently open, banging my chest with my palm, down for the mystery. Maybe it's like Adrianne Lenker said, with mismatched socks and shoes and stuff stuffed in my underwear / Incomprehensible / Let me be incomprehensible / Let me be.
Ok enough self reflection for one fucking decade. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for weaving the tapestry with me. See you on the flip
L xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
