Not My Best Work…

The last time I wrote a personal blog was about 10 years ago. Life is good for periodically stripping me of everything that grants me routine, a sense of safety and the ability to auto-pilot through life and forcing me to reflect, reinvent and reevaluate my own bullshit. In these times, I’m challenged to reassess what mindsets, people, values and vices no longer serve me. I’m reminded how much most of what we stress over is bullshit and how the real living is in remembering who you were before the world convinced you that you would never be enough and that you needed so many things outside yourself to be happy and successful. 

So here I am two layoffs and two children later, once again questioning my whole identity and what that means for what comes next. I came across this clip from defining millennial music artist and problematic fav, John Mayer (Room for Squares was the soundtrack to one of the most dramatic relationships I’ve ever experienced). He shared:

He continues, “And upon closer inspection you will realize it is not stupid, you just broke the tether with the connection you had to all things in the world.” He goes on to say that your thirties tricks you into thinking you will be the coolest person forever. He’s not wrong. I realized that when I had the time of my life two Fridays ago watching “The Craft” with my tween and toddler and baking salted caramel chip Pillsbury cookies. We ended the night dancing to Majid Jordan. “OG Heartthrob” specifically. I changed my Instagram handle to the name of one of my favorite songs by the Canadian-Bahraini duo. It was then I realized, “Holy shit. This song came out almost ten years ago.” Nothing too ridiculous, but a lot can happen in ten years and why I have only found a few songs since then that make me feel the same sense of sexiness, wanderlust and magic that I felt the first time I heard that song.

Cue nostalgia. Because the past can be proven through memory. Most days, it’s reliable, unlike the uncertainty of what’s to come. And the present? It all too often gets taken for granted. But that’s exactly what nostalgia does. It’s a romanticization of a former version of yourself. It’s looking at your life through an Instagram filter (“Glow is my personal fav) that somehow makes you forget the whiteheads and forehead burns that once plagued your past and at the time were actually pretty painful.

But with nostalgia, comes these little things called core memories and I can’t help but feeling like If we knew that a moment would go on to shape so much of who we become, we would make more of an effort to be present in it. We would document it. We would note how the air shifted, the song that was playing in the background, the name of the quiet, that beautiful little park you accidentally stumbled upon while getting lost in abother country. The one where you watched the rats (or maybe they were squirrels) run across the pavement a little too early in the evening.

I’m in the process of romanticizing the present: being in a time where thankfully I don’t have to work and force myself to fit into spaces that weren’t created in order for me to be financially comfortable. I’m in a space where the highlight of my day is a sunset walk with my daughters and the family dog, and I surprisingly love it here. I look in the mirror and truly love what I see and I also can still see the girl who used to color her eyebrows Kool Aid red to match my hair in high school. She’s a girl I used to question and criticize so much, but slowly but surely I’m trying to give her the grace that she so generously offers others. I’m making it a point to bookmark the moments that I know will go on define me as grow older.

With that said, I hate to break it to you, but if you have relatively enjoyed your life up until this point, your 40’s have a way of making you question your whole identity like you’re 14 again and feeling like you just don’t fit into a world that has continued to move along, regardless of the fact that you thought your identity was fully defined back in 2017. Welcome to your mid-life crisis. If you’re an elder millennial like myself this has been happening since around 2020 and you either taken up to baking bread and posting it to your Instagram stories or making Tik Toks about sleeper hidden tracks by Murda Inc. artists.

I titled this blog “Not My Best Work…” because as many moments as I have that make me feel like, “I really am THAT fucking girl that I thought I was,” there are also moments that I’m like, “WTF was I thinking?” It’s a reminder that we are all and will always be works in progress. More than multiple roles, I’m realizing I am just a sum of my experiences. When titles and routines have been stripped away, it’s easy to retreat to what you know to be true; what you know has happened and can’t be taken away. This blog is for anyone who believes that the shitty moments of your life serve as great of a purpose as the moments of perfection. While nostalgia can be comforting, it’s a liar, filled with bias and hazy filters, but ultimately proves that so far, I’ve lived a life that has given me some great stories that I plan to overshare…starting here.