XII- When it’s been four decades…

…and you still kinda don’t know who you are.

It’s sort of expected in your twenties. You’re still figuring yourself out, becoming a proper adult and all that. What nobody likes to admit is that it never really stops. There isn’t a point where you wake up and have become A Whole Person, defined, ready to face the world from your stronghold of knowing exactly Who You Are.

People aren’t static. I sure as hell am not. Every time I think I have me figured out, something comes along and knocks everything off balance again.

I just had a birthday. Those get a lot less important as you get older, ironically; just another day in yet another year, and those years are starting to slip past a lot faster than they used to. They start to look the same. Until you wake up, you’re 41, and you’re staring at what your brain has grimly labeled “the back half of your life” and wondering what you’re going to do with it. What you can’t start now because it’s too late to take it anywhere. What you can’t finish because you never properly started. What’s left.

What’s left.

The older I get, the more I miss the luxury of starting over. Redefining myself. Just, begin again and do it better. But the older I get, the fewer opportunities I have to do that and get anywhere. Unless I want to die and still be sitting on a starting line.

And then I wonder, what does a finishing line even look like, though? What’s the end goal?

I don’t know.

#

Oh, to have been a young Sleep Token fan.

On the other hand, I remember who I was in college. Their music would have hurt so much worse back then. You would not have been able to dig me out.

I remember the glory days of teenaged Hanson fan shenanigans. I was in my twenties for the majority of my Nightwish love affair. It’s fun to obsess when you’re young. (And society doesn’t cast such a side-eye at you when you’re young and obsessed).

It’s…sobering, to realize that when I go to a concert now, I have to consider whether I’m physically capable of queueing for 8+ hours no matter how comfortable my shoes are, whether I’d hurt myself in a mosh pit, whether I’d pass out if I got stuck on the barrier with no water. Whether I’d legitimately have a better time in a seated section further away from the band (ooh, every molecule in me cringed at that, and yet…and yet…).

When I join a forum and it’s half teenagers and young twenties folk, I have to keep my age in mind. I can’t be steering conversations off topic or taking comments personally, because I know better. There are comments I could make around my 40-something friends that would be awkward or downright inappropriate for me to say around a teenager. What if I befriend a fellow fan and they’re 10+ years my junior? Am I allowed I draw Vessel in all his bare chested cryptid glory the way he appears onstage? Am I allowed to comment on sensual themes in the music?

Gotta find the line and stay on the sane side of it.

Being a responsible adult means having shit like that in your head, all the time. The music might make my soul feel all swoony and 20 years old, but I don’t need to share that with a bunch of people I don’t know. I don’t need that level of validation.

I was never going to be a young fan of theirs. Even if I’d followed ST from the beginning, I’d have been in my mid-thirties. That’s the worst kind of FOMO, acknowledging that the thing you want and missed out on is not a thing you ever could have had.

Any new thing I fall in love with from here on out, there’s a good chance its fans and likely its creators are going to be younger than me. I think that’s why Kitee was such a powerful, melancholy journey: I got my first taste of what it feels like to age out of a thing you still love.

It’s a heartbreaking line to have stepped across without realizing.

Maybe part of what this weird masked collective whose spell I’ve fallen under is supposed to teach me is how to come to terms with that.