Hi, friends—
The week before I turned 35 was the first time this scene popped into my head:
That whole week, the refrain stayed stuck on repeat, like a harbingering parrot in some terrible horror movie:
I’m gonna be 40!
I’m gonna be 40!
In the few years since, it’s continued to live rent-free in my head; now that I’m 38, what used to be eye-wateringly funny is just grimly accurate.
How did this happen? Also, why does it matter?
Age has never meant particularly much to me—I’ve never stopped feeling like a kid in an adult body, looking on at the unfolding of my grown-up life like it has all been some horrible mistake. As one year after another has ticked by, I’m conscious that I’ve missed almost every major milestone: marriage, kids, homeownership, a career that makes sense to my parents (I’ve often joked that my family is so uncertain about what I do that I may as well work for the MI6)—and whatever else distinguishes us as bona fide grown-ups.
Coming from an Indian family, I’ve always been grateful that I was never pressured to settle down; I’ve always felt that my choice of an “unconventional” lifestyle was respected, if not entirely understood. In the last few years, I’ve had suspicions that maybe, rather than accepting the life I’ve chosen, they’ve simply given up on me—a distinction that’s depressing, but I don’t dwell on.
I could explain that I could be married already, several times over; I would have had a baby now, if I’d chosen to; and I might have stayed in several jobs if it weren’t for this one voice in my head that pipes up every time I come close to making something permanent. It says one thing: Not this.
For better or for worse, this is the voice I’ve heeded. For a long time, I attributed it to commitment-phobia or self-sabotage (which is what other people would also tell me it is). But with the experience of ignoring the voice and ending up in one bad, over-committed pickle after another, I understood that even if I didn’t know exactly what This! would look like, I’ve always known—really known—what it would feel like.
There was a turning point in my life when I decided that this intuition was a reliable metric that I’d take seriously, and that every Not this was a signpost steering me the right—that is to say, another—way.
Accordingly, it’s a meandering journey with a lot of wrong turns. Frequently, I get stuck for longer than I should in a situation I shouldn’t be in—often because I don’t want to be impolite or a nuisance, or simply because I don’t want to accept that what I’d been so sure was “it” was, in fact, not it. It ends up feeling like this more often than I care to admit:
Occasionally, life will throw me a Fuck yeah, this! to let me know I’m on the right track; and sometimes, that will turn into an Oh hell no, not this which, while profoundly disappointing, and sometimes heartbreaking, is always a gentle nudge to steer me back on track.
I’m a big believer in choosing, one way or the other. Iyanla Vanzant says it so well:
The willingness to make conscious choices is another way of demonstrating that you are ready to find new ways of living and being before you are forced to do it. When what we do, how we do it, and the way we do it no longer fits our purpose in life, we must choose to do something else. It means we are aware of our patterns, and no longer choose to embrace them.
It’s a long game of “hot or cold”, and I’ve discovered that my single biggest barrier to doing what’s best for me, is what people think. Accepting that doing what I need to do will often mean that people won’t like me for it has been the hardest lesson for me to learn—I think this is true for any people-pleaser. When you’ve spent your whole life crippling yourself to keep other people comfortable so that what they expect of you is accommodation, no wonder they don’t respond well when you suddenly change the dynamic. “You’re not who I thought you were” is a tough thing to hear, but acknowledging that this is true has got easier, as has not creating those expectations in the first place.
The important thing I've realised about making myself a vassal for the needs of others, at the expense of my own, is that no one is asking me to do that. This may have been a necessary survival mechanism as a child, when getting my needs met depended on those of others; but at some point, it ceased to serve me, and I didn’t notice it until much, much later.
When I talk about struggling with what people think, people have always been quick to point out that others care about us much less than we think they do, because they’re preoccupied with their own lives. Yes, this may be true—and it implies a narcissism in our thinking that, I believe, is also true—but what often gets overlooked is that if we have spent our lives making ourselves available at people’s behest, if we have been moulding ourselves into a form that is convenient for others, they will notice when we change and they will also, most likely, resent us for it.
This is the hard part: displeasing people. At the heart of it, I think all people-pleasers are looking for approval wherever we can get it—and when we realise that approval often comes from being who someone else wanted us to be, we also realise they’re not going to be pleased when we decide to be who we want to be. Thus it becomes a question of choosing ourselves over others—which is extremely hard for many of us to do, when we’ve been taught that in order to survive, we must be who someone else needs us to be.
There’s an excellent book on this topic called The Drama of the Gifted Child by Alice Miller—although it’s written in a very reader-friendly way, it can also be extremely hard to digest; but I think it’s a very important book for people-pleasers who want to break old patterns.
You’d think I was going somewhere with this, and that this is all building up to some important point—but I’ve just remembered that the reason I started talking about age in the first place was so that I could complain about my back. That’s right, I threw my back out last week—correction: I’m gonna be 40, and I threw my back out last week, and I immediately forgot what I was talking about and went off on a rambling tangent. This feels… not youthful.
How I did it adds insult to injury: bored of sitting at a desk, I spent two days working from a rocking chair because, ironically, I thought it would be more comfortable. Rocking chairs, to me, are the epitome of a contented life; when I imagine sitting in one, I imagine thinking, “Everything is alright.” So I sat smugly in one for two days with my laptop, feeling so sure I had hacked a good life, and then I had a whole weekend lying flat on my back to feel old as hell.
I had an existential crisis this week—NO WAIT, at my age this fully qualifies as a midlife crisis oh dear God.
Anyway, I returned to Berlin; I returned to bone-chilling cold and someone else’s flat, where I’m (so gratefully) staying since I was forced to move out of mine this summer. Maybe it was the sudden transition to dark days that invited my mood to meet it, but I immediately and thoroughly fell apart.
“Alone” is something I rarely feel. I love my own company and am content in it, and I count solitude and silence among my fundamental needs. (It is also impossible to feel alone when there are two cats constantly underfoot or sitting on my chest, p̶e̶e̶r̶i̶n̶g̶ screaming into my face.) But this week, I realised that my solitary contentment depends more than I realised on being anchored in a space that is mine.
I’ve never been a man and so I can’t speak to a man’s relationship with his home, but my own experience as a woman has been that making a home for myself is something that I have had to learn to do. I think that women are raised to care for other people, with ourselves demoted to the level beneath however many others we are expected to care for. For most of my adult life, I’ve taken care of others while waiting for someone else to take care of me. It was a long time before I realised that that was not going to happen—also, I realised that I was not prepared to settle into a relationship or arrangement I didn’t want to be in just so I could be taken care of.
Nevertheless, looking after myself was something I learned to do very, very unwillingly. I didn’t want to take care of myself; I knew only how to take care of other people, and I did that very well. I attribute this in part to my cultural upbringing: Japan and India are both communal cultures where you take care of other people, by virtue of which you are also being taken care of by someone else.
Along the way, I also internalised that my needs, in general, were secondary or even invalid. It was many years, and well into my thirties, before I learned to recognise, validate, and meet my own needs. Having my own home, a safe space I created only for myself, was the biggest part of this process. A home for me became not somewhere I held space, waiting for someone else to fill it, but my own space where I held myself.
My home has given me stability in the worst of times, has been the literal safe space that got me through crises; through heartbreak and burnout and grief, being able to provide myself with an environment in which to support myself has been the most empowering feeling. Without my own home, I feel disempowered; like I have no ground under my feet. I feel like I’m dangling in the air, totally vulnerable and unable to take care of myself.
I’m not given to self-victimisation, and “why did this happen to me” or “this is so unfair” is a narrative I stay far away from. But this past week, thinking of my own, beloved home, just down the street, that I can’t return to because of a deranged neighbour who may or may not want to murder me but definitely tried to break into my flat while I was in it, has been unbearable. I want to go home. And because I can’t, every existential crisis has found me in my exposed state and convinced me that I have nothing to show for my 38 years and cannot even support myself.
This took the form of a panic attack which, as they tend to, took me completely by surprise. While I am, fundamentally, a deeply anxious person, I function; panic is not a condition that ever overtakes me. But one night last week, I felt the walls closing in on me, my skull felt like it was being crushed, a heavy demon attached itself to my chest, and my vision began to blur. My impulse was to run away, so I ran out of the room and onto the balcony. I sat on the floor gulping in air and crying—if that’s what you can call gasping and shaking while tears ran down my face. I moved onto the sofa eventually, and then to the bed, where I spent most of the next day wailing.
In the afternoon, I was coaxed out to take a walk in the park. It was an offensively beautiful autumn day with blinding, golden light and crisp air that was so decadently… autumn-y, and the park was exclusively populated by young couples with babies in strollers. I miserably looked at each adorable family and wondered what they had done right that I hadn’t; or what I had done wrong that they hadn’t. I told myself that nobody wanted that with me, and that I was 38, homeless, and alone.
This narrative is not true—as my friend Sarah told me this morning, “Language is important. You are not homeless; you have a home—you just can’t live in it.” That’s a truth I try to hold onto, but I find myself fixating on other details like how everyone I have ever loved has had, or will have, children with someone else—including the guy who once broke up with me saying, “I’m not ready to have kids right now, and by the time I am, you probably won’t be able to”, and the guy who planned to have a baby with me and then broke up with me when I got pregnant. Some of it I chose, some of it I didn’t, but this is how my life has turned out; I mostly feel at peace, even very happy, with my life—but every now and again, I see it with a shock and ask myself how it happened this way.
On that day I felt, overwhelmingly, like I had failed, and I walked my failure ass through the park on that gorgeous day and cried and cried. And then I did what I believe every well-adjusted adult in the throes of an existential crisis would do, and I got drunk.
The wine and company of a couple of girlfriends who live within walking distance (because I could not bring myself to go anywhere) hit a kind of reset, and I woke up the next morning feeling depressed and drained, but no longer panicking. I’m not crying anymore (well, not all the time), but I’m still scared; I can’t really see the other side of this, though I’m regaining a sense that this is only temporary.
At worst, I’ll use it for art—the great thing about creating from life is that, unlike cooking, you can always make something good out of something bad.
I’m funny. I claim this on the basis that I often make other people laugh, and that I often make myself laugh. I’m funny enough that men will look at me after I’ve made them laugh and say, “You’re funny” in a way that makes me want to roll my eyes and punch them in the head, but I settle for asking them why they sound so surprised.
The only place, in fact, that I haven’t been funny is Germany, a greatly distressing fact of the past four years; it occurs to me now, in fact, that many of my readers are German, and probably cannot think of a single time I’ve made them laugh. At least there’s nervous laughter, ha ha.
I’m funny enough—and unfunny enough in Germany—that I started doing standup a couple of years ago because not making people laugh is very bad for my self-esteem. Most of my humour centers around me being awkward and uncomfortable, but are not the kind of jokes that land when people go, “Oh you do comedy? Tell me something funny!” Comedy is such an outlet for me to vent my discomfort that I called my sets “standup complaining.”
Because of the pandemic, my standup life was short-lived—first lockdown took away our stages, and then 2020 took away my jokes. For about a full year, I was too sad to be funny; or, rather, my humour changed. It became a lot darker—so dark, that it was too raw, too uncomfortable for me to share. I took terrible experiences and turned them into jokes that no one has seen or heard—it makes me feel better to turn pain into comedy, but it might hurt too much to hear other people laughing at it or, worse, feeling sorry for me.
Gradually, it’s shifting; I’m getting some of my silliness back, and I’m more comfortable with my humour reappearing as dry, sardonic quips that make other people uncomfortable as well as poke fun at my own discomfort. It helps that my closest friends are all brilliantly funny people who make me laugh every day; it is impossible to stagnate when you are surrounded by people who inspire you. I’ve started pulling out my material and retiring or rewriting the old stuff and reviewing the new stuff, wondering if I’m ready to share it yet.
I’ve had the past month to think about being funny while in India where I’m one of the designated family jokers. My cousin is probably the sharpest and funniest human I’ve ever met; while I’ll never be funnier than him, occasionally catching him off-guard and making him belly-laugh is rewarding enough. The rest of our family will frequently roll their eyes, point their hands in our direction, and say, “Ayyo, these two.” I’ve always assumed it’s a hereditary trait.
Then last week, I noticed how heavily I lean on humour around my dad. Now that he’s more uncommunicative than ever, jokes are an easy way of eliciting a response from him. But what I realised, suddenly, is that this has always been our dynamic—ever since I was a kid, and not just since his stroke. I must have been pretty young when I figured out that laughter is a reliable metric for engagement. I couldn’t always get what I wanted (or needed, for that matter), but I could usually count on a laugh. I wonder for how many funny people this is also true.
I believe that what we most want is to be seen; there’s nothing more painful or invalidating than not being acknowledged. We may behave in myriad ways in order to get that need met: achievement, people-pleasing, fame (or infamy), self-destruction, making bad choices, humour. I believe this is why social media has become as successful as it is, because it taps into this very base need we all have to be seen, to be known.
The problem with social media is that it’s designed to exploit this need by turning up the noise exponentially the more we engage with it, causing us to engage with it more in order to be seen and heard above the noise. It’s a perfect system of exploitation that, it seems to me, can result only in the madness of the masses. As with so many success stories, only a few get that visibility that so many people are competing for—that position goes to those who can play by the rules of the game, the result of a Faustian bargain that, I believe, most of us aren’t (shouldn’t be) capable of.
I’ve staked my wellbeing on this being true, and I’ve folded. It pleases me to be out of the game, looking on from the sidelines, as much as it pleases me to watch people destroying and being destroyed. Social media is such a misleading, innocuous term for what we now know that it is—social massacre seems more accurate.
Once again, I digress (and am starting to wonder if I Digress would be a more fitting title for this newsletter). There is a point I’d like to make here, which is that it dismays me to realise that one of my best qualities may have been born of some primal survival instinct; that I figured out, as a child, how to game the world around me to get a fundamental need met, however I could.
However (and this is the point), as an adult, I don’t get to hold those around me responsible for healing my wounds; that is my job alone. Yes, at some point in my childhood, I picked up some damage that has continued to inconvenience me through learned behaviours and unhealthy patterns; that was not my fault then, but it is my responsibility now.
Over time, my dad and I have reached a mutual understanding; though he doesn’t tell me, I know how fiercely he loves and is proud of me, and he knows that I know. It feels good to be able to make him laugh now, because it’s one of the few things I can do for him to make his life better. Despite his struggle to communicate, he still makes me laugh, too; he had a coughing fit one night and I asked him if he’d like to have a glass of water, and he glumly replied, “Yes… Or die.” I replied, “Don’t do that before Mum comes home, she’ll be sorry to have missed you”. These are the jokes we share now.
Another morning, at breakfast—typically wordless, but a comfortable silence—my dad and I smiled across the table at each other; then he chuckled for no apparent reason. “What are you laughing at?”, I asked, and he replied, “I’m happy.” Funny how the things that matter to us can change so much.
Cats that helped this fortnight
A couple of weeks ago, I accidentally spent a couple of hundred dollars by mistakenly purchasing two DNA tests for my cats, which is why I shouldn't window shop while half-asleep on the toilet soon after waking up. A scramble to email customer support before 7am was not how I wanted to start my day, but suffice to say this is what separation anxiety did to me. Six weeks was far too long a separation.
I have never been so happy to get back to my kids, and they are satisfyingly overjoyed (few things more demoralising than having one’s affections rebuffed by a pet).
Things that helped this fortnight
Bangalore sunsets
Showing off in between the rains.
Jennifer Coolidge
I feel certain that if I could just watch Jennifer Coolidge being Jennifer Coolidge all the time, everything would be about 30% better.
Sweatpants
I’ve recently discovered sweatpants for myself, which has led to the simultaneous discovery that women’s sweatpants are shit. My advice: buy men’s—I have these ones in light grey, and I can’t take them off (because they’re so comfortable, not because the legs are strangle-tubes I can’t free myself from, which is evidently how brands think women like our sweatpants).
The Melt Method
I haven’t done this but I feel like I should. Maybe you can do it and tell me if it works.
Chris Evans playing piano
Movies!
I haven’t watched movies in forever and now I’ve seen so many great movies suddenly. This one was the most romantic and gorgeous, this one was exceedingly silly and fun and this one was even sillier and funnier. I also watched this one which was awful but I didn’t hate, and most of all made me wish the original (every millenial’s favourite teen movie?) was on Netflix—and NOW IT IS, Y’ALL. I watched it last night and it felt so familiar and comfortable, like hanging out with an old friend.
TV!
Loved this, didn’t love the male lead—was anyone else convinced by him? Don’t love this as much as Season 1 (are the characters suddenly unlikeable?) but Julianna Margulies will keep me watching anything.
Love & Basketball
I can’t find one of my favourite movies ever to watch anywhere, so I’ve contented myself with reading this excellent essay about it by Roxane Gay, who loves it even more than I do.
A reading list
I read Olive Kitteridge last month; it was not always enjoyable, but astonishingly-written and moved me to tears. Otherwise, I keep starting books and putting them down, so my recommendations this month are scant. But this seems like an excellent (if a tad overwhelming) resource.
A good playlist
I’ve been enjoying this one this week:
Intensity
Honestly, the effort of pretending to not care too much is worse than caring too much.
I share personal stuff truthfully because it helps me, and also may help someone else—either because they’re going through something similar and might feel less alone, or because it helps them to hear of someone who’s worse off than they are. Schadenfreude is a potent painkiller; I’m known to take the Petty Pill myself, sometimes.
It’s less satisfying when it doesn’t work. I’ll leave you with embarrassing evidence of this.
I hope you’re having a better week than I am, friends.
If you’re the praying kind, I’ll take ‘em.
Have mercy,
PS By any chance, are you enjoying The Percolate? Do you think a friend might, too? It would delight me to no end if you helped to spread the joy (which, granted, sometimes sounds like misery). Hit the button below to send it to a friend or just, y’know, share the shit out of it on social.