27.

On getting older, vulnerability, suffering, and contentment.

Image credit to Zouassi

How are you meant to feel on the eve of every birthday, where time unfolds, encapsulating the grievous and awkward feelings that you can’t quite pinpoint? It’s a Monday night. I’m sitting at my desk, my white Anglepoise lamp radiating a warm yellow. Shadows cast onto the walnut blinds that cover the expanse of the window I am positioned behind. By the time I hit publish on this, I will be 27. I don’t care too significantly that the years are increasing. I know somewhere amongst the uneasiness is a sweet relief of finally embodying a life that feels more than a great escape. Am I allowed to say I have cultivated something of wisdom? Or does wisdom only exist in the terrains of deep grooves in the face and decades of life experience? Whatever the answer is, I can only say for myself that I am attempting to be free from the reigns of pain as an identity, knowing I can encompass far more beyond that.

In the earlier inklings of thoughts that harassed my mind on what to write, I was almost certain that my segway back into the word realm would go in the direction of sharing my pain crudely. When I wrote these prior unpublished pieces, it felt cathartic, with a rush in my head, the adrenaline drilling into my spine. The rumination spiral began, questions simmering in the quest to figure out why the fuck I was even writing in the first place. Do I want to feel seen? Am I being honest enough? Is this raw and eviscerating all at once? Nothing felt natural, and all I could produce were streams of consciousness that felt like a bargaining attempt with an imaginary audience. Buckling at the knees, clutching at someone to unveil me. I felt outside of myself, deconstructed and unwholly.

I can’t say I regret any piece of work, for it will always lead me to a place of sifting through the multiplicities I exist within. But I was entrenched in these pieces in an attempt at self-sacrificial martyrdom. Spilling, pouring, god even bleeding onto the page. I really did believe this would be the bravest, most honest, and rawest attempt at re-introducing my writing into the world again. I felt it to be the sincerest way to speak of myself. In the language of suffering and sheer deep, blinding, merciless pain. Do we draw into the suffering chamber to produce our best work, or is there something more cannibalistic about all of this?

There is no shame in my story and the ways in which life tormented me through obtrusive and obstructive myriads of chaos. But I question the presentation of vulnerability and pain in an age that is so deeply entrenched with suffering as the language of wading through life. The lingering thoughts in the back of my mind made me ask myself if I even identified with the pain I was writing about anymore, and the reality is, no. Life certainly feels far more content, far less suffering induced. Was this my attempt of the narrativisation of trauma content we so often see from swathes of words on the internet, feeling an urge to legitimise my current existence through my painful past?

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Suffering posits itself as a core tenant of human existence, where many religious and spiritual practises deliberate suffering in duality with pleasure and the material world. Historically, humanity has witnessed grave and deep sufferings, much at the hands of ruthless injustice. Yet there is no denying that in the Western world, we have developed an unhealthy fascination with vulnerability porn. We rip our chests open, retrieve our hearts, and hold it in the bloody palms of our hands to prove it can still beat. Have no doubts, my concerns do not extend to the people of the global south who have to beg and plead for a shrivel of Western empathy, yet still remain fiercely in spirit, whilst we are soulless. We long for understanding because we exist in the hellscape of capitalism that shatters the experience of connections we are wired to receive. We are more disconnected than ever, where each attempt at sharing offers a false sense of intimacy that leaves us lonelier and further isolated. Are we really the honest people we think we are, or are we merely chasing closure through confession?

In many cultures, pain is not an identity to bathe in. It is seen as external to you, whilst you retain your personhood and spirit. In the Western world, we are called upon to seek diagnosis upon disorder upon label upon whatever else to allow this to control our identities, losing ourselves day by day. We internalise that we are defective, disordered, and broken, positing an idealism of what a ‘normal’ human should exist as, in a society that is built on the mass destruction of humanity. We are plagued and sickened to pathologise every minute detail of our existence, but we are emptier and more spiritless than ever. Western society has corrupted our spiritual psyche through dehumanisation, where we are seeing a mass death of our souls.

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I have no desire to make this is a critical essay, but those are the thoughts and questions that have swarmed my mind and travelled down my oesophagus into the pits of my gut. As I turn 27, my desire to present myself as a hook to draw the reader in with the shattering violence of my experiences does not resonate or feel particularly useful to myself or anyone else. In the same regard, I also have no desire to become a washed out watercolour palette, void of the vivacity of colour and boldness. There is also no happy medium, because writing is not a conveniently neutralised middle ground to bring together two neat parallels and posit oneself in the middle. This does not mean I do not share, because there are plentiful ways I could write about my own mapping of the world, my grief, and how I want to exist in boundless ways. There is no quest to chase authenticity, because the most truly authentic thing to do is letting myself be.

Getting older really has been a turmoiled task of just being. I realised so much of the suffering I wanted to lament were parts that were calling to be integrated into my inner world. Existing beyond my pain and moving into wholeness is the life I am slowly building. You do not earn the right to humanity by bleeding out and proving you deserve to be human. Capitalism has conditioned us to think so, whilst simultaneously alienating us from our emotional experiences. You are not broken. You are a whole person. A human. In this rejection of survivorship of pain as an identity formation for myself, there exists a contentment that isn’t always neatly bound like the edges of a freshly printed book that has never had its spine cracked open. Contentment has come to solidify itself in acceptance. My pain matters, but it no longer absorbs me and engulfs me to the point of paralysis. There are many days I feel raw, and sore, like my flesh has been stripped and I am bracing the cold air ripping into me. I let it pass, and try to accept it. That is all I can do. I have existed in the storybook of my own madness before, but I am certainly not a damsel in distress that needs to be saved.

The contrast in my willingness to be open now, is that I can choose to be selective. Like walking the lengths of a library, picking up each blurb, and only choosing a few books to take home. I am the librarian and the archivist all in one, flicking through and pulling out which one seems best. Reflection is what I honour. For my sharing to be cultivated through the labour of love and the beginnings of the creation of a beautiful life. My willingness to share does not come from picking up the santoku kitchen knife, stabbing myself, and bleeding onto the page. The beauty in life is not a lack of suffering, it is the integration of suffering as a catalyst for creation, transmuting itself with deep passionate desire.

The creation of something more than comes from stumbling in and out of pandemonium, from the whispering depths of the pit of rock bottom where you are forced to bargain and find a way out. 27 is not the year of survival. It is the marker of the signage of peace. No white flags of surrender exist here because surrender I did not. It is not desperate, pleading, merciless, calling for the miracle worker to bestow some magic. I exist and create beyond the horrors that fell before me. I am more than my own survival of the world. I deserve to be a human. Broken, I am not.