How Can We Be More Of An Adult?
As we grow older, we start to realise that life isn’t that hard. Sure, it may be confusing. If it is the case that decisions were easy or self-evident, then there is no need for a second opinion or the existence of the self-help section. We need to bear in mind that when we receive feedback, solicited or not, it probably comes from a place of judgment, envy, disapproval or a mix of them all. It may very well be good intentions from friends, but ultimately we’re on our own. What makes it worse is that we start to feel the diminishment of highs and lows towards the end of our twenties. The dulling of affect is double-edged. On one side, we come to terms that no other heartbreaks will come close to the pain we’ve experienced from our first serious relationship. We’ve garnered enough cushion of experience to know for a fact that this emotional turmoil will go away eventually and that there will be many “The Ones” coming along next.
On the other side, we also know that when we fall in love again someday, it’ll be less euphoric than ever.
As we venture towards our late twenties, we start to suspect if there are any new emotional experiences that will jolt us out of our current life cycle. Perhaps a new piece of music, a new person or a new type of cuisine that makes us question everything we’ve knew so far. Often, we cast doubt on the new and land on the belief that whatever comes next in life are simply ever-fainter echoes of our past experiences. But there is a new revelation in the age and time when we’re deemed to be apparently matured adults. We learn to understand how multilayered rarefied emotions come by and we appreciate them, especially for how exclusive they are. It is like bumping into your childhood best friend in serendipity after losing contact for decades only to discover nothing has been lost over the years. In fact, it is still the same two clowns that your teachers has been desperately trying to separate for many semesters, just a little older with a little more responsibility. It is like chancing upon your ex-girlfriend in the mall with her hands in the man of another with flashbacks of you crying in the bathtub knees towards chest and actually smiling, acknowledging that you’re past this relationship.
It is like discovering regret for the first time knowing deep down that real regrets don’t leave you in tears, but in guilt.
Unlike the simple happiness or sadness that we’ve experienced when we were (much) younger, these complex emotions only become apparent with distance. We start to appreciate them the same way we unknowingly sing the chorus of a song. It makes little sense the first time we hear it, and the music only becomes intelligible and memorable in recapitulation. However, I believe these complex emotions tend to tilt towards a more pessimistic note. If we were to crunch the numbers by percentage of time spent being happy vs time spent being unhappy, our life, or maybe it is fairer to speak for myself, that my life will probably net out more on the negative side. It should be obvious by now that my writing stems from a place of examining the darker aspects of life. However, it is assuring or to a certain extent, life affirming, to know that I’ve been consistent this way for the longest time I’ve known myself to be. If there is any clear sense of comfort in being older, it is having the ability to point out from various past episodes of our lives that we’ve been constantly ourselves the way we live our lives. Probably why we’re better story-tellers as we age appropriately like wine. We learned the art of revisiting our frustrations and satisfactions as current happenings and memories of our personal story simultaneously. We’re in a stage of our lives where we’re contented in an ironic sense that we find peace in saying we’re slightly bored of it.
