Self-Esteem And Small Dreams: Saying Goodbye To Twenty
It’s a running joke among my friends and I that my twentieth birthday was the longest day of my life. On the surface, this sounds like the opposite of a problem – the one day of the year you’re almost owed mindless self-indulgence lasting longer than the allotted twenty-four hours seems like something almost no-one could complain about. Despite that, my pursuit of pleasure certainly came with its own set of not-so-pleasurable consequences.
The day before my birthday, the 29th of November, we began the night with pregaming – which swiftly moved into my friend trying to smoke a cigarette in my kitchen, tobacco exploding all over the floor, accompanied soon by her vomit. We tucked her into my bed, tufts of her hair poking out from beneath the duvet as she dozed off comfortably. The rest of us headed out to Simmons Bar regardless, drank and danced for hours, received our post-bar takeaway where we were named whores in Arabic – gleefully (yet regretfully) translated by my Egyptian friend. Upon returning to our accommodation, the night having drained us, we discovered an ambulance parked outside which led to immediate panic – my friends and I sprinting up the stairs to my flat, hearts racing, all to find my drunken friend still swaddled cosily under the sheets, albeit with vomit now staining not only my duvet and floor, but also my walls. Then I, with the help of my calm and collected child-nurse flatmates, cleaned up my floors and my inebriated friend, then sent her on her merry way to crash on our kitchen sofa. I woke in the morning – still my birthday! – and attended my noon lecture, went to dinner with my coursemate, returned home and took a lengthy nap – then woke up to it still being my birthday. I had a three hour movie night, and when it was over, it was still my birthday! I accomplished more in those twenty-four hours than I think I did in the rest of my first semester of university.
I told my eighteen year old friend at the time, in a conversation where she was speaking to me about being afraid of getting older and the possibility of heartbreak, that twenty feels like becoming a woman. There is no longer the scapegoat of ‘-teen’ at the end of your age, your hips begin to widen despite your best intentions and you begin to crave smoke breaks when you’re stressed. A lot of my twentieth year was nonsensical, discontiguous, hurtful – but it may have been the best and shortest year of my life. As people get older they say that a lot, right? Every year the fractions of your life become smaller and smaller – a year becomes nothing.
Twenty is the age where you’re expected to make bad decisions – drink too much, stay up too late, flirt with people you shouldn’t be speaking to. I have done my fair share of all of the above. Yet, when getting older you are also inevitably confronted with worries about your future – a never-ending list to ensure your comfort and wellbeing before your death: a stable income, a loving family, a well-furnished home, and so on and so forth.
On the other hand, as I was scrolling through the many hundreds of Google documents I have hoarded in my years of writing, I came upon a bucket list I wrote at fourteen years old. Six whole years ago, almost seven! I wondered what my mind could’ve come up with the summer before my GCSEs began, from which I remember nothing else but watching the sunrise after my first all-nighter. July 25th, 2018... I couldn’t hold back my laughter at reading it, at my childish ambitions: kiss someone, try weed, get a tattoo, walk on the beach at night.
What small dreams in comparison to how big and daunting adult life seems on the verge of twenty-one. Today, I am halfway through my university degree, in an entirely different country, and I have experienced more of these hedonistic pursuits than I think my fourteen year old self would have bargained for.
I’ve seen others make lists on their birthdays, especially a milestone as significant as twenty-one. I considered it briefly: twenty things I learned at twenty? I squashed the idea instantly… could I come up with one thing I learned, let alone twenty? Everything I have learned this year is a lesson that I will continue to learn. Some of them are things I knew already, things I had to come to terms with, things that came to light in specific and unique ways that feel flattened when I put them on a page as a lesson. How can I truly say that I will never let a man disrespect and disregard me again; that I will always stand up for what I believe to be right; that I will never judge people without knowing the whole story? I believe, instead, that I can only say I made the same mistakes at twenty that I will make next year, and the year after that, and I will continue to learn these lessons over and over. But at least I know now that they are mistakes. Maybe one day I won’t make them, but I don’t think the learning will ever stop. I think the temptation might always be there.
I have, from my fourteen year old bucket list: had a one night stand, went to a proper high school party, lit sparklers at night. These small dreams seemed like my entire world at fourteen; perhaps they still should be. Perhaps this is what I should take with me to twenty-one, a lesson I can continue to learn by continuing to look back: these small experiences, these human experiences, they are what my life is. Beyond an excellent job and a first class degree, maybe I should return to the simple hedonism of my fourteen year old mind. In churning out ideas for everything I wanted to do before I left this Earth, everything that I needed to accomplish before I died, I wrote: get a cat, have sex. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so accomplished as when I opened that document and found I could cross most of them off the list.
What would my fourteen year old self say to the dark pleasure of feeling the man I loved dancing against me at a Halloween party, solo cups sloshing with spiked punch, mouth to mouth in a crowd of strangers? What about the flock of my friends whooping and yelling down the street-lit pavements of central London, half a joint in hand, burnt to the filter, clinking bottles of cheap wine? What would I say to riding the bus back to Stratford at 4am, smudged makeup and aching limbs, bag of takeaway chips hugged to my chest, a new number tucked into my contact list? I like to think my fourteen year old self would look at me with awe-stricken eyes.
She was shy, repressed, anxious. She couldn’t speak in front of her crush, in front of the popular girls (who were never really that popular, or even cool), let alone make out with strangers and move to a city where she knew no one. She couldn’t have dreamed of putting her writing out for anyone to read, of wearing short skirts to the club and throwing parties with long guest lists.
Pursuing pleasure can be contrary to pursuing truth, but I think I have never been more genuine than when I held onto what felt right and what felt good as my end goal, when I stopped being afraid of what I truly wanted. I found my religion this way, I found my friends this way, my hobbies, my passions – holding on with clenched fists to the things that give me joy and refusing to let go… doing things that I know would bring me joy even if they scared me at the moment of my decision.
What if I had written in my bucket list: get into Oxford, publish a book, meet the Prime Minister? Would I have done more with my life, or just felt like I had done a lot less? Maybe a mix of this is the truth I’m pursuing: that my pursuits should not be oriented on pleasure but they should never be contrary to it.
I return, as usual, to my favourite poet Mary Oliver when seeking life advice. She writes, let the soft animal of your body / love what it loves. This peace of acceptance, of desire – I believe it has served me much better than trying to crush the writhing body of want within me, the burgeoning hedonism that I believe lives in most of us. Isn’t it sad, and contrary to the purpose of life, to quell this want? What drives us in the things that we love most if not desire, if not want, if not self-indulgence?
I will never be twenty again, I get to say goodbye and thank God for that gentle mercy. I have learned over and over again, and I will continue to, possibly for the rest of my life. I will try my best to hang onto the things that give me joy, pleasure and peace – this is the best lesson I can come up with to take with me to twenty-one. It has gotten me this far.
Edited by Roxy-Moon Dahal Hodson
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