The main difference, as far as I can tell, between adulthood and adolescence is this: if you're 16 and having a bad day, it's 100% the worst day ever and if you're not contemplating suicide from moment to moment, it's only because, sob, you're so strong and misunderstood and if you kill yourself, you won't ever be able to revenge yourself upon the persons or things causing you to have such a terrible, terrible day. If you're say, 23 and having a bad day, the reaction is more like this: did I get enough sleep last night? oh my god, when was the last time i ate something?... when was the last time i had an orgasm? how much whiskey did i actually consume last night? Or along those lines anyway.
Which is not to say that it's impossible to be angsty at 23, or that the reasons for angst aren't weightier, if anything. Being twentysomething is like being a goddamned leper, minus the whole "my limbs are falling off! this is an actual medical condition!"-justification. It's just that, by now, most of us have achieved some distance from that self-centered, paranoid, apocalyptic tendency that most teenagers exhibit early on and right through the very end. Hopefully. I was a veritable Hamlet myself, though more outwardly cheerful and less crazy, and I'd accepted my self-diagnosed bipolar disorder until I was about 17 and realized that if I was bipolar, so was everyone I knew. Which didn't make it easier, the next time something totally fell apart, to step back and calm down and understand that the largest part of the problem was actually my own reaction, which in turn was due to hormones, chemicals, lack of sleep, and the general batshit insanity that is being a teenager in this crazy world. But now, aha, sweet sweet clarity is (mostly) mine.
A darker day than yesterday I've not had in many months. Which is in itself odd, since for most of those past months, I've been just as unemployed and annoyed as I was yesterday. I mean, unemployment aside, there are plenty of good reasons to wander around miserable and scowling. The general state of things, for one. This horrendous late summer we're having in L.A., the plight of the polar bears, the Ugandan children, and Iceland's banks- further: the fact of Palin's existence and ubiquity. The point being that there is no shortage of reasons to feel angsty and apocalyptic in this day and age. The other point being, so what the hell was particularly wrong with yesterday? If I were still a wee lass of seventeen or nineteen (nineteen being far worse by virtue of at that point being in college and all that that entails), the day's misery would have resulted in intense journal-writing, letter-writing, calling the bestie and crying for an hour or so, or else in a good three hour block of chain smoking after having downed half a bottle of whiskey. Which of course would have resulted in today being as atrocious a day as yesterday.
The point! What is the point? The ultimate point is this: when an offhand comment brought me to tears of rage, did I drink, did I brood, did I imagine the world ending in a fiery collision with a comet? Ok, so I did brood. For about ten minutes, before I realized I was being moronic, and how come? As far as I can tell, it was due to a combination of interview-exhaustion, lack of sleep, and low blood sugar due to a lack of appetite due to a cold (which in its first days was itself enough of a reason for some amateur-level brooding). And while I'll curse the heavens for as long as I live for the fact of my animal nature's chemical dependency, I'm also really really glad that I can step back from myself and realize that while, yes things are shitty and some degree of consternation is justified, the "end of the world" is just as easily the result of sleep deprivation as anything else.
And speaking of so-called markers of maturity, I recall reading somewhere once that the day you're officially an adult is the day you can't walk past a sink full of dirty dishes without either stopping to reverse this condition or walking on and feeling guilty all day long. Silly. Total bunk! I know plenty of lovely people who are functioning adults in every sense of the word, who love to live in pigsties. In my case? One hundred percent the truth. And though I think astrology is total bunk as well, I must admit that in the case of dishes, I wonder if it isn't the Virgo in me making its anal-retentive self known.
What else? I've gone from being the world's worst insomniac to having an intense and passionate love affair with my bed. In high school, I ran on about five or six hours of sleep a night, and managed even to function in society and all- well, as much as any teenager can. In college, god, you'd think someone had cursed me to die in my sleep at any given time. I was pro at being awake for three days in a row, and functional to boot, though of course by the third day I'd be seeing music and talking to the imaginary pet that lived in my poor addled head, or whatever. Right up until senior year, I was the inadvertant witness to more sunrises than most people will ever see in a lifetime. I've even narrowed down the precise sensation produced by watching your second sunrise in forty-eight hours: it's like someone's sifting sand down through the back of your head. Lots of sand. Heavy, heavy sand. Anyway, that explains most of the angst I felt back in those days, I expect.
Now, at the ripe old age of 23, if I sleep less than eight hours, I'm pretty much a monster. I feel ugly and slow, I'm quick to anger or sadness if I don't sleep enough. I function well enough, which is a good thing, considering that I love to be awake til late at night and most jobs begin in the early hours of the day. I just feel like shit, and whether I realize or not that it's due to lack of sleep, it mainly... is. What's this damned fascination with my own sleep habits, anyway? Not with sleep habits, really, but with the markers of my own aging. The markers along the line of my own mortality... blah blah. For the most part, I'm just glad that I'm far enough around the bend to debunk the occasional apocalypse, for my own peace and sanity. Knock on wood, in any case.
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