I’m turning 21 soon
8th April 2024
I am generally not one to be moved by birthdays, but this particular one has been hanging over my head for all of the well-stereotyped reasons. I somehow managed to convince myself that 18 is cursory adulthood, but it is difficult to avoid reckoning with 21 more seriously; hence this long-form chimp-out.
Growing up, I was always much taller than my peers. This was often commented on, to the point that it became an indelible part of my identity. I distinctly remember the point at which this ceased to be remarkable to people — not one tells an adult that they’re “so tall for their age”, as doing so is patronising to the point of implying a developmental disability. My height is now only commented on by distant relatives who last saw me a decade prior and anons on the internet scraping together evidence to call me a “fakecel”. As you age the scope of what becomes notable about you slowly constricts: words are only spared for the truly exceptional.
21 feels like the general terminus of this. Beyond this threshold, you can never be “prodigious”. People catch up, and you are confronted with the reality that reading a lot of Wikipedia at 13 does not warrant hero-worship. While you’ve been wasting away on Twitter, other people with more well-adjusted childhoods and adolescences have hit the gas, and you can’t smugly justify your lack of team-sport participation to yourself anymore. So it goes.
All that these subdued years of being nothing more a “based librarian” have earned me nothing more than a deep uncertainty, a wariness of brash commitment to my thoughts. I no longer aspire for more than grasping: the moment I pin down the direction of an idea, its magnitude evaporates. I have made this sound rather romantic but in process it is indistinguishable from village idiocy. The upside, however, is that I have a newfound respect for the village idiot. He has intuited a piece of wisdom about the world that has taken me my entire literate life to even begin to understand. “How do we fix the world? What are your beliefs? What do you want to do with your life?” — it takes a certain authenticity and moral fibre to say “I haven’t a clue”. I will spend the rest of my life attempting to forge the courage to admit I know nothing.
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising, I console myself with the fact that a lack of answers is not a lack of thought. I miss the hard and crystalline clarity of my younger self’s worldview, but it was a deeply monochrome way of contending with the world. Uncertainty has widened my palette — I must revel in it, revel in the discomfort of it. My devotion to philosophy has largely been replaced with a devotion to poetry, because poetry understands this notion intuitively. It is essentially therapy for people who suffer from this affectation.
Keats talks of “negative capability” — the capacity to accept and embrace contradiction without feeling an overwhelming urge to collapse it into fact and reason. To follow the unknown through and behind the veil of language, and to grope blindly in that vast and unlit room. I think this is a suitable manifesto for the next decade of my life. If I have faith in anything beyond God’s will, it is that this pretentious and self-serious pedantry is unavoidable if I am to live a life dedicated to the beautiful and the true.