Fluorescent Adolescent
Nobody wants to have fun anymore!
To be entirely honest friends, I meant to write another post before the year ended. I have the draft saved: another bleak, meandering question about grief and identity and the wet stain of death. But I read it again last night—and was bored.
It’s a new year, and I think we all deserve a bit of a break from the darkness.
I hate to get into Discourse when this newsletter is very obviously shaping up to be morbid navel-gazing and Tumblr-era lit recommendations, but I can’t help it. I’m worried about the youth, and consequently, how the opinions of random 22 year olds online is making me, a grown adult, second guess my choices. Which I don’t like at all.
This isn’t a new concern, and it’s been widely documented (see this particular Tell The Bees installation) but the growing adoption of puritanical attitudes especially at the cross-section of introversion and isolation is frightening. It seems like nobody wants to put themselves out there anymore (I get it! It sucks growing up in a surveillance state!) and nobody wants to get their hands dirty. Body count discourse, clean girl aesthetics, tattoo removal as a micro trend, treating dating like a chore, being shocked by the idea of free will (yes, you’re allowed to leave your house and get a milkshake at 10pm, I know it sounds crazy)—all of it just makes me, well, sad.
Not because I think people shouldn’t enjoy their introversion or their rest or do the things that make them feel good and safe, but because I personally, someone with a particular and well-earned lust for life, have also fallen victim to the same ideology in recent years.
I used to listen to this same Arctic Monkeys song on my iPod mini in the car on the way to the mall in 7th grade and get stuck on the lyrics: You used to get it in your fishnets / Now you only get it in your nightdress. I had braces and had never been kissed and still I thought, wow that is depressing.
Earlier this year, after a long bout of deliberate abstinence, I found myself wondering if I hadn’t started living out my greatest middle school fear. A coworker and I were reminiscing on our respective day-to-night eras, the years right out of college when we’d go to happy hour every day after work and come home after midnight, or not at all. I told her how I used to keep an entire outfit change in my bag, plus extras: tank top, eyeliner, fresh underwear, makeup wipes, deodorant, Advil, condoms.
I realized mid-conversation that I couldn’t remember the last time I had agreed to spur-of-the-moment post-work drinks, let alone slept with someone on a weeknight for the thrill of it, not out of half-bored obligation after a mediocre date. I still had Advil and eyeliner in my work bag, but that was it.
So, one night in early June, I decided to break a seven-month dry spell on a Monday night with an Australian man I met at a hotel bar. [An editor’s note here would probably include that being blinded by grief and three glasses of whiskey helped guide this decision, but to a larger point, I was itching for something new.]
In the morning, after waking up on white sheets in his penthouse apartment, I practically skipped home. It was one of those first hot days, where the pavement is already warm at 7am and the sun and the birds and the buzz of it all seem to be urging you to call in sick to work and go to the beach instead. I walked six blocks back to my apartment in a hot pink mini skirt and cork wedge heels, thighs bruised and hair tangled, hearing “Man! I Feel Like a Woman” in my head with every beat.
I felt—thanks to a one night stand—alive again, something I had not felt in months. When I was younger and more afraid I needed someone’s hands on me to make me feel like I was still tethered to the earth and breathing. These days, I just like to feel someone’s warm skin on mine for the human desire of it all. It turns out, I’m not ready to put on my nightdress just yet.
One of my favorite universal truths—an axiom, if you will—is Two Things Can Be True.
I spent a good deal of my 20s using bar hopping, binge drinking, and casual sex—all the fun stuff!—as an objectively unhealthy and desperate escape from the pain and confusion I felt then. Occasionally, I still feel some shame for the ways I lived during that time and the things I did to try and save myself. This is all true.
However. I still get a lot of joy out of going out, drinking (sometimes too much), and occasionally sleeping around when the mood strikes. This is also true.
When I start to feel burdened by the shame of my youth, I often turn to this Margaret Atwood quote:
“We ate the birds. We ate them. We wanted their songs to flow up through our throats and burst out of our mouths, and so we ate them. We wanted their feathers to bud from our flesh. We wanted their wings, we wanted to fly as they did, soar freely among the treetops and the clouds, and so we ate them. We speared them, we clubbed them, we tangled their feet in glue, we netted them, we spitted them, we threw them onto hot coals, and all for love, because we loved them. We wanted to be one with them. We wanted to hatch out of clean, smooth, beautiful eggs, as they did, back when we were young and agile and innocent of cause and effect, we did not want the mess of being born, and so we crammed the birds into our gullets, feathers and all, but it was no use, we couldn’t sing, not effortlessly as they do, we can’t fly, not without smoke and metal, and as for the eggs we don’t stand a chance. We’re mired in gravity, we’re earthbound. We’re ankle-deep in blood, and all because we ate the birds, we ate them a long time ago, when we still had the power to say no.”
Sometimes I feel ankle-deep in blood because I ate the birds. I opened Pandora’s box, I threw myself head first into the black holes of bottles and other people’s beds. I can’t take any of it back. The omnipresent Catholic guilt tells me I’ve sinned—and that I keep sinning. I’ll never be clean. But ultimately, in the moments when I’m able to come out from under the weight of the Cross, I think hedonism is largely misrepresented and misunderstood.
One of my dad’s favorite sayings, “Life is for the living,” I believe has multiple meanings. One, that when people die we have to let them rest and we move on, because they’re no longer of this world and we, the living, still have things here to attend to. The other is a more literal interpretation: Life is for living. Get busy living or get busy dying. I don’t want to sit safely on my couch for the next 30 years and hope something good happens to me.
Hedonism, by definition, is the philosophical theory that pleasure is the highest good and proper aim of human life. I’m like, 70% aligned with this. I still think there are higher goods and aims—compassion, caretaking, service—but I think we (yes, I’m roping us all in for this one) forget sometimes that feeling good, enjoying whatever time we have here, is kind of the whole fucking point.
Two things can still be true. Yes, I’ve had to rein in my own hedonistic desires when they were getting in the way of me actually living fully. I can’t be naked and drunk all the time, as much as I’d like to be. And yes, having excitement and unrestrained pleasure in my life—living for the thrill sometimes instead of chaining myself to some self-imposed moral grindstone—makes me feel like my favorite version of myself.
I’m not saying at this big age we should (still) be going to the gas station on a Tuesday night to get Colt 45 and play Edward Fortyhands in someone’s living room. I’m just saying, I think we could all be a little less rigid with ourselves.
I still have hope that younger generations can shake off the weight of expectations, the unattainable standards of being good or clean or perfect, and just dig in. I realize how old and Boomer-coded that makes me sound, but it’s true. I’m glad to be older and to know what I know now, but sometimes I miss the weekends I was never home, when I’d wake up in Williamsburg or on Orchard Street and take an Uber back to Astoria just to change my clothes and go back out again. The day Biden got elected in November of 2020 was one of the last times I lived so recklessly freely. Upon hearing the news, I (inexplicably!) shaved my entire body, and went out for the day, knowing I probably wouldn’t be home until long after dark, if I came home at all. I met a friend for brunch in Greenpoint and drank Champagne on the sidewalk, I went down to Domino park and drank G&Ts out of styrofoam cups with other friends, I hopped over to Bushwick to have afternoon sex with an old fling, I crossed the river for dinner in the West Village. Electric, all of it.
Life is long and multi-faceted. We already ate the birds, and we’re earthbound no matter what.
So—I spent New Year’s Day with a man in my bed. Not because I needed to, but because I paused and decided and reached out for pleasure deliberately. Sometimes I’ll get a thrill of nostalgia when I touch up my makeup in the office bathroom before meeting a friend for dinner. The excitement in my life is different now, it’s disparate and less desperate, but it’s still there. There’s still a world of unknown good waiting every time I say Yes to stepping out of the comfortable bubble I’ve built for myself.
All of this to say: I’m going out tonight. I don’t really care what happens in the morning.