The normal thing for people to do it seems is make a lot of mistakes in high school, have a lot of fun and adventure in college, and then take what you get out of it in your mid-twenties and turn it into a “life.” Turn your job into a career, buy a house, marry whoever you’re with, and become an “adult.” I’ve always felt like I was 5-10 years behind. My mistakes are more spread out. My adventures have been a little less adventurous (camping in the badlands vs. backpacking through Europe.) I hardly started dating by the time most of the people I know had met the person they were going to end up with. The relationship I was in at 25 created more issues than it resolved.
I’ve worked more intensively on things I find personally important, and less so on things that are socially meaningful, mainly because I could do them at my own pace. Social activities always put pressure on me. I’ve found that creative things like art projects or music I could mediate the pressure and channel it properly. The pressure comes from life and the world itself and as an artist you work as a filter for that, to make it meaningful and do something with it. Social pressure is different and I never learned to deal with it. It’s not as heavy but it’s directed right at you. If you fuck up with a friend, you feel it. If you do somebody wrong, it’s obvious.
Obviously the ideal is to live with someone that’s easy to live with and ignore the greater world around you. Some people do that, but my guess is they do something for that greater world that supports the dominant powers within it to back up their lifestyle. You can’t ignore a world that’s crushing you.
When you’re 22 and in college, living in the city, and everyone you know does art, and they’re all in bands and carrying notebooks around, it’s easy. When you decide that you want to take that aspect of life seriously, you have to be ready for everyone that helped you to be inspired by it in the first place to ditch it for a more normal life.
I turn 30 next week. My late 20s have hands-down and overall been the worst 5 years of my life. I’m trying to dig up the parts of my younger self that I miss, and weed out the baggage that’s been holding me down since I was a kid, all while trying to hold on to the parts of myself I can’t afford to lose. I’ve never felt this alone, and probably not coincidentally I’ve never felt less creative. But knowing what you need to do and having the means to do it are two different things.
By the way, this blog is really supposed to be creative-oriented. I don’t like this stuff, but I have to write about the things that are keeping me from maintaining that aspect of my life.