perfect at 25
(Warning: Kinda heavy stuff again. If it ain’t your thing, move along, nothing to see here.)
So yeah. Like Choire, my birthday is also this weekend. I will turn 25.
Life, barring such events as planes falling from the sky and my amazing ability to lose clothes, is actually pretty good for me. It didn’t use to be so.
I remember crying a lot in high school. Course, I would never shed a tear during school. Chin up, get through classes, don’t let people know you’re a faggot, ignore the fact that the guys you’re having lunch with have poker nights every Friday and you’ve never been invited and will never be invited. Wait three agonizing hours, take the commuter bus home to the suburbs, and ignore the fact that if your parents aren’t screaming at each other, then your sister is sitting on the bed the room over, talking with the voice in her head that she thinks is Princess Diana.
And all that emotion, the sadness, the rage I should have, would be bottled up. Nope, no need to worry bout me. I’ll be okay. At least I know my parents aren’t screaming to each other about me. I’m the good son. The good son. Until I’m in my room, anyway. Then the floodgates would crack and I would sob uncontrollably for the next hour and half. I did that every week for the next couple of years. (I’ve stopped crying altogether, probably 3 years ago. But that’s another story altogether.)
Where was I going with this? Oh yeah, 25. When I was 15 or so, miserable with the way I looked, acted, felt, everything, I made a pact to myself that if I wasn’t tall, attractive, popular, absolutely perfect by the age of 25, I would throw myself off the Golden Gate Bridge. (Okay, totally drama queen of me to say that. But c’mon now, that’s coming from a fifteen year old. A closeted gay one, no less.) But 25 seemed far enough away.
Every couple of years, the whole “suicide at 25″ thing would pop up in the back of my head. Well, less the actual drama-queen act of throwing myself off a bridge and more the fact that if I wasn’t smarthandsomeperfect by then, something drastic was gonna happen, whether I like it or not.
And now my 25th birthday is on Saturday. To my horror, I’m starting to not relate to MTV. Mutual funds and tax-deductable donations are making sense. I’m turning into that 25 year old adult I was envisioning myself to be ten years ago, but it’s hit me — holy shit, life isn’t sucking as hard for me anymore.
Well, the planes and the economy and the stolen clothes, yeah, that sucks pretty hard. And I’m not even 50% of the image I envisioned myself to be ten years ago. But I’m strangely content — the most I’ve ever been in my life, ever. The stuff I could improve on? At the very least, it seems possible now. I’ve got friends that would back me up in a fight and would probably not help me up if I slipped and fell, but would probably laugh uncontrollably and take pictures to post on the Internet. Which is cooler, in my opinion. Life is gonna be okay.
Which is cool, because otherwise I would have had to made plans to jump off the Golden Gate bridge on Saturday. And with that whole terrorists bombing the bridge rumor, that would have buy pretty inconvenient to plan.
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