28

Hi friends, and family, and loved ones. I’m gunna start this one out by saying if you’re a friend, or a family member, or someone who loves me, you might not want to read this one. Like, I’m fine, but if you already lose sleep over me this won’t help at all.

I have a confession to make. I did not think I would make it past 27. DON’T WORRY-I had absolutely no plans to do anything to myself, but there was an actual mental block there when it came to planning or seeing my life past 27. Never saw kids, a spouse, a house, nothing.

There was this book I read when I was around 15 that I got out of the bargain bin at a bookstore. It was called “Stupid and Contagious” by Caprice Crane and I will fully admit that I took certain parts of it way too seriously.

Like, for example, the 27 club. I love Jim Morrison. Kurt Cobain soundtracked my angsty sophomore and junior year of high school. Jean-Michel Basquiat had a piece at the Smithsonian when I visited in eight grade, and it had his picture next to it. I thought he seemed too cool to be featured somewhere that also had Dorthy’s ruby slippers. I still scream sing Valerie by Amy Winehouse whenever I’m feeling particularly heartbroken. The list, quite literally, goes on and on. Too many souls that burned as bright as they could, and by consequence burnt out.

Taking it the way over-romantic way, if I wanted to be magnificent, I was going to burn out. That the price to pay for being important, for being cool, was no future. I can hear my therapist having a meltdown from here. As a “I can legally rent a car and no one ID’s me at bars anymore” kind of adult, I know that line of thought is harmful. Like, massively harmful. I wish I could sit past Ashley down and unpack the thinking there. But the thing is, I still believed it up till today.

I knew I was never going to die of an overdose because you’d need to start doing drugs for that. I’m relatively healthy so it wasn’t going to be anything with my heart. I do genuinely enjoy being alive so I wouldn’t intentionally change that. A death by misadventure sounded cool but probably wasn’t in the cards for me. And yet, I still had this mental block in place to be able to picture my life out past 27. Hell, I haven’t booked a place for after Monday.

But now…I’m in a hotel room. Wearing an oversized bathrobe with a facemask on, eating deep dish pizza and drinking champagne from the mini bar. If I’m going to drop dead in the next 6 hours something very dramatic would probably need to happen as I have absolutely no plans of leaving my room tonight. And that is absolutely insane to me.

I spent the last 13 years basically spinning my wheels worried about 27. To be fair, this last year was awful. So my weirdo fixation on it was only reinforced to be true. Which sounds insane and probably disrespectful to the people who died, I know. But I think being minted into the year I was fearing 3 months deep into the pandemic, ending a relationship I knew was wrong for me a few days later, and packing up my stuff and becoming a nomad a couple months later seals the deal that I don’t get to live the same life after tonight.

I don’t get to stay scared. I don’t get to play quiet, or hesitant, or nervous anymore. After tonight, I’m in absolutely uncharted and unplanned for territory. And I’m a little excited. I didn’t let myself feel like this until now. After I got back from two days of walking around Chicago (where I didn’t accidentally fall off a building) and an afternoon of driving through the city (where I didn’t come close to getting in any kind of collision), I closed and locked the door behind me, and finally sat down to think.

What’s next?

And the only answer that’s coming to mind, is that I have no earthly idea.