Turning Twenty-Five
An Incomplete History of Things
I.
Five years ago I landed in a Hollywood sublet from a touring musician after a few weeks abroad. I spent my twentieth birthday on Manhattan Beach alone taking pictures and got my dinner paid for by a stranger. I read romance novels on my phone on the bus ride back. Got a beer at Fred 62 and wrote a poem on a napkin.
In two weeks, I will be twenty-five. I get ID’d more now than I ever did as a teenager. Maybe I wear less makeup or I’ve just let my natural hair grow out but I don’t think I look younger, although that would be immensely comforting. I’ve always had a thing about aging.
My last day as a teenager I was in mourning—no longer the age worth mentioning in poetry or songs. I believed there was something innately romantic about being nineteen: its cuspiness, a bridge to girlhood and grown-up responsibilities. I believed teenagers knew something the rest of the populace didn’t, held powerful secrets about the world. I thought being young and brilliant would be enough to sustain a life. Twenty-five was a cryptic future terror.
II.
When I was twenty my drinks were comped and I got rides home. I saw celebrities feeding parking meters and photographed musicians. I liked being prodigious and reasonably accomplished.
I saw women over twenty-five as embarrassingly ancient with their marriage dreams and Facebook profiles. As if aging were some great personal failing—their unsettled homes and careers proof of a youth ill-used. I thought, with the rest of the world, that women over thirty unless eminently talented or possessing obvious masculine qualities should quietly disappear.
Womanhood did not exist to me in the real world except as a strange amalgamation of corporate servitude and motherhood. By contrast, girlhood existed unto itself, marked by freedom and philosophy and desirability.
I spent months with men who had histories and homes. I called their ex-girlfriends (women their own age) old and boring. It was years before I understood there would be another nineteen-year-old hooked on them and she would lie in crumpled sheets, glance at my picture, and say the trick words I knew by heart.
III.
I was renting a room on Kings when I turned twenty-one.
I heard stories about the woman who lived in the room before me, who was in her thirties. She hid vodka bottles in her suitcase and got the cops called on her when she broke into our room after misplacing the key.
I read scripts at the WGA library and bought books about screenwriting. At the end of a month, I had written a feature set in Oklahoma in the early 2000s. It wasn’t exceptional but it was good enough to land me an assistant position in a writer’s room. I was featured in the Oklahoma Gazette. I placed in fellowships. I dated guitarists and skateboarders. My essays got published.
I watched the world shut down, watched Los Angeles retreat indoors and explode on the street. Apocalypse loomed as I moved to an East Hollywood studio and racked up parking tickets. I visited my mother and watched television.
IV.
Turning twenty-two I watched girls my age get Botox above their eyebrows and felt old. I wore sunscreen and got a Tretinoin prescription. Bleached my hair like I did when I was sixteen, this time without the help of a professional. It turned yellow so I covered it in pink dye. FaceTimed men while LA was on fire.
For a brief spell, I was the Executive Assistant to the president of a cable network. He gave me orders from my phone as I rattled off emails at seven in the morning. I rolled calls from a boat, took notes as they killed off good shows and funded bad ones.
I wrote scripts, fundraised for projects with friends about our lives. Met semi-famous people. Attended their art shows. Smoked in Highland Park. Quit smoking, took up vaping. I watched my friends get big on the Internet and felt proud.
I envied boy geniuses who wrote conventional stories about college and family and get called the voice of our generation. Got over it, finally feeling my comparative, staggering privilege. Humiliatingly, money became glaringly visible to me only then; how it accessed pleasure, stability, and (most important to the development of craft) time. Recognized the system in nearly every meaningful way (except perhaps being young, queer, and a woman) favored people like me.
I walked at night through the Silverlake hills with beer in a water bottle and wrote pilots on back patios. I drove up the coast, went to therapy. I was already getting tired.
V.
On my twenty-third birthday the first boy I ever kissed died.
I donated to the funeral fund. Met a man at a festival afterparty at the Wax Museum three weeks later. I was photographed at various events. Partied in the hills. Drunk men proposed marriage.
I wrote out of ambition and monetary gain. Began to wonder why I ever loved the craft in the first place. I turned twenty-four at a tasting menu by a Nigerian chef.
VI.
I cried rereading On Writing on a plane and internalized none of its lessons.
I became obsessed with violence and its parallels to desire. How brutality in the context of femininity encapsulated a girlhood I recognized. Received a fiscal sponsorship and raised money for my directorial debut. Shot the film in Pasadena.
The world overwhelmed me. I sent emails. Spent Thanksgiving in Palm Springs, wiled days away in a two-story apartment, got unemployed, got work again. Crashed my car. Slept on an air mattress in Van Nuys. Danced to punk music, fretted about my age again. Vestiges of childhood were vanishing. Quit vaping. Took up vaping again. Accepted clothing from various well-dressed friends.
Considered indeterminacy, artistic representation of truth and its distinction from honesty. I came to appreciate optimism and the value of life.
VII.
Men liked to ask me to write something they could direct, produce, or at least attach themselves to. Invariably I refused or the ideas fell through. They did not understand what made my writing my own nor the kinds of stories I valued. Even if we loved the same films, what we loved about them never seemed to align. Art, to us, meant different things.
Still, when they told me I was gifted I believed them.
Their advice, once productive and encouraging, curdled to exacting critique—I felt increasingly diminished. Now that we were peers they could be honest with me: my little web series and scripts were charming amusements, impressive for an autodidact my age; like an eager seal applauded for balancing a ball on his nose but it was time to get serious.
They told me I was gifted when the tricks were still diverting, surprising, adorable even. When they stopped calling me brilliant I believed that too.
VIII.
When I was closer than ever to the stage of true adulthood, it hit me, perhaps for the first time, that life was long and I would spend much of it being old and perhaps this wasn’t a bad thing.
I aimed to create art rigorously, write something born out of love. I talked to God. Considered returning (in a religious studies sort of way) to believing in heaven.
I missed being the kind of person who could conceptualize a spiritual connection between all living things. Attended a small service in Pasadena. Heard a story of a stillborn and watched the pastor’s face tighten, his lips move, “Fuck.” Prayed with twenty people, most of them married, who fought for abortion and queer rights and Black Lives Matter and socialism. Jealously watched their devotion. Felt unclean for being so uncertain, knowing I prayed for the wrong things.
I thanked the friends who invited me and did not return.
IX.
I read books as I did as a child: in great swallows, several pages a minute. I read (and reread) Maggie Nelson, Harry Dodge, Woolf, Siken, Artaud, Sontag, Kathy Acker, Blake, Chris Kraus, Ocean Vuong, Clarice Lispector, Jia Tolentino’s piece on vaping and another about Matty Healy, her essay collection, Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Parul Segal, Car and Driver, local zines, Chelsea Hodson, books recommended by friends and BookTok, romance novels (mostly contemporary, some historical, though I couldn’t stomach virginity plots anymore), smutty fantasy bricks, Meg Cabot, Didion, Francesca Lia Block, Raymond Chandler, books about the deficit and quantum mechanics, books about girlhood, Bukowski, poems and newsletters by friends, Michael Lewis, the Brontës, celebrity memoirs.
Read a poem I wrote in fourth grade that got put in an Illinois Young Poets collection:
I run to the beach as the white hot sand
burns my toes,
And I wonder
Why the crashing waves come in again and again
I feel a surge of loathing
And jealousy toward them
For their determination.
How the sun shines its beam of hope
Where is the stream of faith that I thirst to drench myself in
These questions wander through my mind
As I dream sleeplessly for answers.
I texted my mother this poem is certain proof I’ve always been way too emo and insomniac for my own good and it’s a miracle I didn’t discover The Cure until later in life.
X.
I studied the photographs of Larry Clark and Mark Hunter and Justine Kurland and Niki S. Lee and Catherine Opie and Ed Templeton and Angela Hill. Watched silent German films and Kelly Reichart’s early stuff and Bergman and Ôbayashi and Fellini and The Hangover and movies with Tom Hanks and Twilight and Succession edits to Mitski and K-Dramas and everything made by Jenny Han.
I listened to Taylor Swift and Carly Simon and Tim Buckley and Earl Sweatshirt and Glitch Gum and Remi Wolf and Ethel Cain and Miranda Lambert and Ke$ha. I wrote up interviews with people I admired.
I opened the windows and danced in my apartment, bought natural wine. Stoked arrogance. Felt misunderstood, lethargic, full of anti-heroic sentiments. Joined the picket line at Paramount. Watched a strike announcement on a live stream.
XI.
I live on my own with a parking space requiring Tetris-level maneuvering to exit (still—my own parking space) and furniture from friends and their boyfriends and a television from Costco. My room is a mess like always but I don’t leave dishes in the sink and I go to spin class and drink water now.
I still go walking, see friends, wear makeup. Someday soon I will attend their weddings. Hang pictures on the walls and get a bigger couch. I will get older, take care of my body and probably my mother’s. Become the age I never fully believed I’d reach.
I will braid my hair. Become communicative. Let my skin freckle and crease. Grow my hair unruly and white. Find beauty in the ugliest of physical dents like I do now with trash and dying plants on the sidewalk or a highway tunnel set in a mountain. Work. Grow.
Watch stuttering lights from my apartment window, fireworks glancing off the Los Angeles skyline. Be glad to have loved so many people, known bodies and tenderness and art and a little about the world. Be glad to have felt life move forward, back, against and towards infinite expansion. Maybe felt a little celestial too.
Glad I had at one time been young and brave with time enough to write poetry.
Time to pour wine and watch television. Time for loving, drives through the flats, vacation, house concerts, heartbrokenness, therapy, new shoes, perfume smelling of sunscreen, snow-covered mountains, black coffee, new LPs on the Internet, friends at work, cold winds in the Palisades, video diaries, reading in the grass, fresh sheets, thousands of ordinary days. Felt my heart in my fingertips and known it to be of the world. Be grateful I had time enough for such a life.
This was genuinely a gift to read—thank you for it bub