As I flip the calendar forward each month, slowly making my way to my thirtieth birthday, September has finally transitioned from an abstract shoreline, hazy and non-descript, to a cruise port, neon signs blazing, something I can no longer ignore.
It’s not that I feel anxious about getting older. I’m just surprised how quickly the last ten years have flown by.
This disconnect between how old you feel versus your actual age is quite common. Last April, Jennifer Senior wrote a piece in the Atlantic examining this unnamed yet seemingly universal phenomenon: “Adults over 40 perceive themselves to be, on average, about 20 percent younger than their actual age.” As with most things dealing with the human brain, science doesn’t fully understand this discrepancy, though there are some compelling hypotheses.
Maybe it’s a coping mechanism, a way for us to accept we are getting older without completely throwing in the towel. Maybe it’s in response to some traumatic event. There’s a reason why the ‘pandemic skip,’ this idea that the trauma of the pandemic has shifted how people view themselves, resonates so much, particularly among women around my age. It’s harder to accept that I’m turning thirty this year when it still feels like I’m playing catch up, forever two years behind.
Other theories aren’t as dark.
We experience events that eventually shape our personality and define who we are in big chunks. This explains why people still listen to music from their youth because the music from that time helps connect us to that sense of innocence. It’s a time when we felt like we really were adults, even if we were actually just babies. We were so young. We knew nothing about the world but thought we did.
Adolescence and our early twenties are often a defining period for people because it is a series of firsts. The transition from high school to college comes with new forms of independence. There are first kisses, first loves, first heartbreaks. After college: a first job, first apartment, first time eating shit and face planting outside of Pianos, complete with a scar on your leg that will eventually fade with time. As we move out of that period, looking back with rose-colored glasses is something researchers call the “reminiscence bump.” I can understand why.
In many ways, I am still that same girl from 2014.
I still have an unabashed love for Texas, something I was reminded of earlier this weekend outside of a bar. As I walked away to order a Tecate, a friend simply commented, “Texas,” their head nodding as if this were the most rational decision in the world. The sun rises, the sun sets, and I will always try to find a way to talk about Texas.
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My ears are forever scanning the low hums of conversations around me, waiting to hear someone mention ‘back home,’ though it’s less about wanting to move back and more about loving the idea of a place rather than the practical realities of it. Politics of the state aside, I don’t see myself living in Texas again because I hate driving and hot weather.
Growing up, it was always a place I couldn’t wait to leave. I always wanted to move to Chicago - the land of deep dish and Fall Out Boy and John Hughes. It was Chicago or Bust, which is how I ended up at a small college 45 minutes north of the Loop for my freshman year.
Looking back now, that year in Lake Forest feels like a fever dream.
There was my crush on the radio station manager, a shy senior always one article of clothing away from cosplaying as a lumberjack; my first kiss under a willow tree at Winnemac Park before we awkwardly avoided each other for the rest of the year. There was my roommate - a hockey player from Boston with her sweat-soaked gear - always opening the window as wide as possible in the dead of winter. I would find myself waking up in the middle of the night to close it, teeth chattering, only to reawaken hours later and repeat the cycle.
At Egg Harbor, I finally got over my distaste for scrambled eggs, a dish I had avoided for nearly a decade, after a particularly excruciating hangover. There were a series of odd jobs: answering phones at Donati’s, a singular shift at Billy Corgan’s tea house, stuffing envelopes in the drafty admissions office. A montage of my friend - a mousy tech theater major - and I hiking into town to split a pack of cigarettes ‘so we can practice’ for all the ‘cool’ parties we would surely get invited to, only to cough and choke and realize that if this was the price of campus notoriety, we’d pass.
Coming from a large Texas high school - my graduating class had over 1,200 students - attending a college that was roughly the same size eventually became boring. And as much as I wanted to live in Chicago, Lake Forest was a suburb, not the city itself.
A friend from high school was attending the University of Chicago at the time. Every other month, I would make the multi-hour journey on the UP-N to Ogilvie before transferring to the L and eventually a bus to spend a weekend with her. It was during one of these epic journeys that I realized I needed to transfer.
Ten years ago, I left Chicago to head back to Texas, ‘back home.’
That summer, I met a sweet socialist drummer in the dusty backyard of a house show. We would date for the rest of college.
It was my first ‘Adult Relationship.’
I would make the three-hour Megabus journey from Dallas to Austin nearly every other weekend. In between scarfing down P.Terry’s and watching Game of Thrones, much of our time was spent loading up gear in the back of his Mini-Hatch before careening down Speedway or slowly crawling down River Road, praying for a parking space right in front of that night’s venue.
One summer, we drove from Texas to California before he started a semester-long internship in LA. Driving down those long stretches of highway with nothing but brush and mesa on either side is an experience I’ll never forget. We watched the sunset over the Grand Canyon. We made a detour through Route 66 to stop at a gift store, marveling at the smooth stone and hand-painted signs. Once we arrived in LA, we spent an afternoon at a beach.
We thought we were such adults, so grown-up, so mature. I softly shake my head and can’t help but smile at how naive we were, how quaint yet important that time in my life was.
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The following year, we completed our coast-to-coast road trip. We drove to Ohio for one of my research projects - I ended up talking to union workers, disaffected white men who would later swing the county for Trump that fall - before extending our trip another few days to pass through New York. He had a friend living off of Himrod Street in Bushwick. It was my first time in New York and it was magical.
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We walked and walked and walked and I fell in love - this time with a city. After that trip, I knew I needed to return.
And I did.
Seven years ago, my mom dropped me off at the airport and I boarded a plane that would take me to New York, to Brooklyn.
It was a time spent traveling to the Upper East Side to hang out with a friend from college - we had met in an art history class - as we spent the early morning wandering around Central Park, discussing boys and roommate drama. There was dancing my way up and down the Lower East Side, Williamsburg, Bushwick. I met and married a man who I would later divorce.
I eventually made my way back to Texas, this time working on the political transition for the Harris County executive, a woman only slightly older than me who was suddenly in charge of making decisions that would impact millions of people. I would travel coast-to-coast for work several times over, making my way from San Francisco and Oakland, Denver and Grand Rapids, Pittsburgh and Boston.
In many ways, I still feel like that 19-year-old, so sure of the world and my place in it.
I am still taking pictures of clouds, still rolling my eyes outside of art museums, still an introverted extrovert who could talk to a wall but can barely string together a sentence in front of a crush and will awkwardly scurry away if a man so much as smiles at me.
Just the other day a man on the street said he recognized me from a bookstore, asked for my name and number. He wasn’t creepy about it. He was just a cute Park Slope man with a tote bag making his way down the avenue. My response? I literally froze before sprinting away.
Some things never change.
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These last seven years have made up the bulk of my twenties, a time spent navigating a transition into adulthood, into what it means to embody that word.
As the summer season finally kicks off this weekend with Memorial Day, I find myself entering the final summer of my twenties unsure what awaits me, but knowing that if the last ten years were any indication of what to expect, I should buckle up, because this next decade is likely full of surprises, full of wonder, a series of limitless possibilities that I can’t even begin to imagine.
xx kayla