on the in-between-ness of my early 30s
Half of my friends live in beautiful, sunlit houses in the suburbs with age-appropriate toys scattered on the floor and half-finished home improvement projects abandoned in the dining room. They are excited about a new pregnancy, concerned about property taxes, and reassuring me that, at thirty-one, I’m still young and have plenty of time to figure everything out.
The other half of my friends live in one-bedroom apartments just ten minutes out of downtown with popcorn ceilings, shady landlords, and at least one guy they’re pretty sure deals coke out of his car. They are excited about the friend group’s plan to do molly at the club on Saturday, concerned about whose turn it is to pay for the Lyft, and reassuring me that, at thirty-one, I’m still young enough to keep up with the 20-somethings doing key bumps at the club at 2am.
My partner asked me to do an “open relationship summer” experiment and I said yes. Honestly, it seemed like a great alternative to breaking up or to diving deeper into the fact that I proposed over two years ago and we still haven’t gotten married. What is marriage, anyway? I ask myself philosophically. [Insert rant here about the government and how all American institutions have really been created to oppress the working class and serve the interest of the ruling class through capitalism. Marriage = House = Babies = Consumption = More Members of the Workforce etc.] “Nothing can ever be certain,” I had told my partner many times, “After all, look at all the marriages we see falling apart every day. Those papers and promises are no guarantee of true security or happiness.” I could not really claim victimhood or even surprise when my own prophecy came true, could I? Had I wanted to be proven wrong or is the slow demise of any monogamous relationship inevitable?
I look at half of my friends, and then the other half. No one seems to hold the blueprints to a happy and fulfilled life for me to copy and paste and customize to my own liking. The ones who are trying to “have it all” seem either burnt out to the point of mental breakdown or naturally full of more energy than I could ever imagine having. I don’t believe that you can ever really own anyone, so who am I to deny someone their freedom, independence, and right to download a dating app? Every TV show I’ve seen depicts married couples as boring, bitter, and secretly longing for someone younger or newer to provide an antidote to what they lack. Maybe I am enlightened enough for consensual non monogamy.
Now I find myself out of town at the gay club past midnight, not nearly drunk enough to approach a stranger, and wondering who’s sleeping on my side of the bed. I feel that, in an effort to have a Buddhist-like sense of detachment from anything and everything in this world, I have put myself in a position in which nothing in my life is truly stable: my relationship, my career, my finances, my housing, my sense of self. The only thing I have been consistently able to rely on for the past ten years is my friends. I watch them make choices and move forward like we’re playing the game of life, but I feel that somehow I am only a member of the audience, watching. If you ask my therapist, she’ll say I feel that way because I’m on the autism spectrum. If you ask me, I will shrug my shoulders and say it’s because I’m a double Pisces.
Where do I see myself in ten years? In my utopia, I am sitting on a second-floor balcony in a rocking chair, opening a bottle of red wine and lighting up a joint while the sun sets over the untouched beauty of the forest before me, a little pasta left on the stove for my midnight snack, surrounded by people with the same ideals and values that I have, laughing until my stomach hurts.
I tell my therapist that I see everyone else as a real person and myself as an abstract concept, an observer, an alien from well outside whatever space is expanding into, unable to live a real life so much as make a series of choices informed by my observations. Other people’s emotions feel real, and my responses to them feel real, but it would take a proverbial gun to my head to help me identify any of my own. I have broad emotions: sorrow for the human race, anger at the institution, enjoyment of eating tiramisu with a cup of black coffee. (That one’s pretty specific I guess.)
I know that people have wives, children, mortgages, law degrees, two-car garages, alcoholism, bipolar disorder, cancer, air fryers. Which of these things do I have, or want, or need, and what do I do with this information? Do I identify where I fall somewhere in this spectrum of the human experience or do I simply pick a point and jump. If I go skydiving or get a medical degree or give birth, will that be enough to weigh me down in my own experience of existence so that I don’t float away like a speck of dust and disappear into the ether?
My therapist teaches me grounding techniques. Five things you can see, four things you can hear… I bring myself back to earth and try to remind myself of the facts. I am a thirty-one year old white woman living in the United States of America in the year 2024. Two appalling and delusional old white men compete vaguely for the presidency of the country. I am employed at a high school that gives me Blue Cross Blue Shield insurance, which is pretty good, all things considered. I absolutely have to do my laundry within the next two business days.
I try to lock into some sense of agency over my own life, some sense that, simulation or not, this is the game I’ve been given to play. It matters. It doesn’t matter. I matter. You matter. The sun bears down, the cicadas scream, it’s almost time for dinner again.
June 2024
Elizabeth Bradshaw 