The Obscure Sorrow of Turning 26

"I'm thirty," I said. "I'm five years too old to lie to myself and call it honor."
—Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby

I turned 26 last month. This, I'd thought, was not a particularly remarkable birthday to celebrate—turning 25, a quarter century, is what gets all of the hoopla. Yet in recent weeks, I've seen several references to the idea that one's twenty-sixth birthday marks the end of foolish youthful hedonism.

There's this humor piece on The Hairpin, "Thank You So Much For Being With Me to Celebrate My Twenty-Five-and-Twelve-Month Birthday," by Julia Meltzer:

As a twenty-five-and-twelve-month-old, it is completely appropriate that I spend Saturday nights locked in my apartment with the five of you and two boxes of Franzia playing Settlers of Catan, Drinking Rules Edition. Max and Joe, I still think that longest road trade was sketchy! No but seriously, when I turn twenty-six that will all be over. I will start going to casual dinners at sophisticated restaurants with friends I haven’t seen in soooooo long, having One or Two Cocktails, and heading home to watch an independent film with my serious boyfriend before knocking off a quick journal entry and falling asleep in a haze of contentment. 

(As many 26-year-olds do, I alternate between the "watching indie films with my serious boyfriend" phase of my life and the "drunken Settlers of Catan" phase. Nonetheless, I relate to what Meltzer is saying about the gap between our real lives and our ideal lives. It's one of my favorite subjects.)

Then there's this, from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows:

Midsummer, n. A feast celebrated on the day of your 26th birthday, which marks the point at which your youth finally expires as a valid excuse—when you must begin harvesting your crops, even if they’ve barely taken root—and the point at which the days will begin to feel shorter as they pass, until even the pollen in the air reminds you of the coming snow.

(Are you familiar with The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows? I only just discovered it, but it is the best. It puts words to all the secret aches and regrets and doubts that characterize life as a sensitive soul in the 21st century, yet so often go unacknowledged. The kinds of delicate, poignant, but universal emotions that I want to write plays about.)

Maybe this is just confirmation bias, turning 26 and then suddenly becoming more aware of/interested in other writers who talk about this.

Or maybe it's that I was born into a huge cohort of Internet-equipped, navel-gazing youths, all full of So Many Feelings, all convinced that we're the first people ever to feel this way, and compelled to share our uneasy angst with the world. We're attending our five-year college reunions, and listening to the new Vampire Weekend album, and watching things like Frances Ha and Girls that speak to the anxieties of our generation; and we link to Buzzfeed articles about "growing up in the '90s" and wallow in nostalgia for a childhood that suddenly feels so far away; and I'm amazed that we don't all melt into one quivering blob of jelly, overwhelmed by the weight of all these obscure sorrows.

(Nota bene: I originally typed "quivering blog of jelly." A Freudian slip.)

And when the more practical voice in your head speaks up to tell you that nostalgia is a foolish waste of time, that your life is actually going pretty well, that you have no reason to castigate yourself for being an "irresponsible youth" because you're a type-A perfectionist who's had maybe two hours of true irresponsibility in your entire life... well, it can be tempting to wish that that voice would just shut up, even though it speaks the truth. Angst and nostalgia are so seductive, and it seems like it'd be so beautiful to stand with everyone else, in confusion and misery, and feel All the Feelings.

As a matter of fact, today is my five-year anniversary of moving to San Francisco. I love it here, and I also realize that during these five years I have matured, ridding myself of many of the self-delusions and false beliefs that held me back, and generally becoming a much happier, better-adjusted person. I'm more outgoing and confident; I have a better understanding of others' motivations, as well as my own. In many respects, I feel like I lead a charmed life (for which I try to cultivate gratitude). This anniversary should be cause for a (responsible) celebration! Yet my joy is tempered with a sense of "Okay, Marissa, you've had five years as an aimless flâneur; now it's time to get down to business, figure out what you want out of life, purge yourself of everything extraneous, and for God's sake, start saving for retirement! You are going to need to push yourself a lot more in the next five years in order to accomplish everything you want to do in your twenties."

In the first blog post I ever wrote after moving here, I quoted Angels in America: "Heaven is a city Much Like San Francisco."

And now, five years on, I'm saying to myself, "The Great Work begins."

And here's another question: now that I am 26, am I too old to refer to myself as a girl? My blog header calls me "a girl with an answer for some things and a question for most things," and in my Twitter bio I'm a "would-be girl-about-town," but at what point does that word start to become ridiculous when applied to a grown, adult woman?

"Blackbird Fly" Music Video Shoot: Mad Tea Parties and Three-Piece Suits

Last November, I got an urgent email from my friend Meg O'Connor. She was producing a music video for a local singer-songwriter, and one of the actors had just dropped out. Would I be interested in waking up early on Saturday, going out to Thornton Beach, and spending the day as an extra in a "mad tea party" scene? I seemed like the kind of person who'd be up for that sort of thing — not to mention the kind of person who could put together an appropriate "mad tea party" costume on short notice.

I was intrigued by Meg's offer and, as it turned out, I had recently dressed up as a suffragette for Halloween, so I had just bought a long Victorian-ish skirt that would work well as the basis for my costume. Meg and her boyfriend picked me up at 7:30 AM on Saturday and I spent a sunny, windy day at the beach, chatting with my fellow extras, pretending to drink tea and eat treats, and trying not to freeze to death.

Despite the cold, the shoot was a lot of fun. So, a month later, when Meg put out a call for dozens more extras for a nightclub scene, I decided to go to that shoot, too. It was a work night; the Olympians Festival was in full swing; I was very busy, and very tired... but something compelled me to participate anyway. "Maybe you'll meet somebody interesting," I told myself. "The reason you live in San Francisco is to take advantage of weird-but-cool opportunities like this."

And as I stood around in the nightclub waiting for filming to begin, I caught sight of one of my fellow extras, a man in a gray three-piece suit and a fedora. And he caught sight of me. I contrived some kind of excuse to chat with him, and soon the conversation was flowing naturally. I learned that he was a high school teacher and a former Classics major — he thought it was so unbelievably awesome that I was involved in a Greek-mythology theater festival. Throughout the night, we continued talking, and discovered more and more points of similarity and connection (we're both from Portland; we went to rival high schools!). Film sets are actually great places for getting to know people — you have a lot of time to stand around and chat with the other extras.
We exchanged numbers and had our first date later that week, seeing Meg O'Connor's Olympians Festival play. Long story short, we continued to see each other throughout the winter, and as of the vernal equinox, we officially became boyfriend and girlfriend.

Needless to say, we are both so glad that we chose to go to the film shoot on that December night, and we love that there's videographic documentation of the night we met! After several months of post-production, the video has finally been completed and released to the Internet. Here it is:

Volary - Blackbird Fly [Official Music Video] from Independent Art Film Productions on Vimeo.

There are several shots of me in the tea party scene (from about 2:00 to 2:40), including a nice close-up. In the scenes at the club, my boyfriend and I can be seen briefly at 1:29 and 3:22, with a slightly longer shot from 3:26 to 3:28 (we're behind the singer, standing against the brick wall).

Here's a behind-the-scenes photo of us on that night (flanked by other friends/extras) if you need a better idea of who to look out for.

My boyfriend and I are well aware that this is one of the most ridiculous "meet cute" stories ever. At the same time, we like to think it's a good story. And it proves the old truism that the best way to meet people is to keep busy and force yourself to do interesting, unusual things.

And maybe the following isn't a truism, but it should be: sometimes, after years of having a love life that is either bad or boring, a man in a three-piece suit will come along, and you'll be smart enough to take notice, and he'll turn out to be a better fit for you than you ever thought possible.

I'm a lucky girl.

How "Jane Eyre" Saved My Life

In 2007, I spent a semester abroad in France. While I hoped to make friends with my host family and other French people, I also knew that my study-abroad experience would be significantly enhanced if I became friends with the other American college students in my program, giving me a ready-made group of companions with whom to visit museums and eat baguettes and live the expat life.

So, as soon as I touched down on French soil, I tried to find myself a group of friends. I fell in with some people who I liked a lot—they were smart and curious and spoke French to each other even when the teachers weren't listening. We had some fun times together, first in Bordeaux, then in Paris.

Then, after about a month, I found myself being ostracized—subtly, but methodically. I don't even know what I had done to offend the others, unless it all started the time I knocked over a bottle of red wine and stained an expensive tablecloth when we cooked dinner at one girl's apartment. And I had thought that this kind of ostracism was a vestige of middle school, but here we were in our third year of college and I was being shunned.

The worst part was, before I got kicked out of the group, I had seen them ostracize another girl who wanted to be part of it. This should have been my first hint that these were not good people. But I was so desperate to belong that I went along with it, helping to snub this other girl. And then they turned around and did the same thing to me; I could see it happening, but was powerless to stop it.

Having lost my group of friends, I felt rudderless. I went to see way too many classic American movies (Hitchcock, Audrey Hepburn, etc.) at the cheap three-euro theater on the Left Bank. I went on a date with a sketchy guy who hit on me in the Métro. And I did a whole lot of solitary museum-going.

I also tried to find consolation in books. The stereotypical thing would have been to "dress in black and read Camus," as the song goes, and there's a part of me that wishes I had spent more time in France sitting in cafes and reading French-language literature. But I already had a lot of school assignments in French; doing my pleasure reading in French would have been too much of a chore.

Miraculously, the one English book I had brought with me was The Virgin in the Garden, by A.S. Byatt, which is now one of my favorites. Its heroine, 17-year-old Frederica Potter, is unpopular with her schoolmates and sometimes hard for the reader to like, but also bold and indomitable. I identified with her, and I adored her.

Then, it came time to choose a new English-language book. Though Parisian bookstores obviously carry a limited selection in English, several of them had a good stock of Penguin Classics. And I have a thing for Penguin Classics; I try to buy as many of them as I can, and I love the way their black spines look on my shelf. At the time, I was also trying to reread classic books that I had disliked when I was younger, in order to see if I got more out of them this time.

All of these factors are what led me to consider rereading Jane Eyre when I was in Paris. I'd originally read it when I was 12 years old, and had not liked it very much. My mother, a fan of Wuthering Heights but not Jane Eyre, finds Jane an insipid heroine, and I think her attitude had rubbed off on me. Also, at 12, I was reading a lot of fantasy books with kickass heroines, so I found it hard to appreciate Jane's quieter virtues. Moreover I was turned off by the constant references to Christian morality, and sentimental scenes like the death of Helen Burns failed to move me.

So I took the latest Penguin Classics edition of Jane Eyre off the shelf of the Parisian bookstore, and perused the back cover. And there, in Penguin-orange type, contrasting with the elegant black background, was a quote from the novel:

You probably can't quite read that, but it says, "The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself."

That was when I knew that I had to reread this book. I knew that it would become a lifeline for me.

So I made my way around Paris, solitary, friendless, but sustained by reading Jane Eyre—reading it voraciously, living in its pages. I burned with Jane's passions and marveled at the fact that I had ever found her insipid. The Penguin Classics introduction takes pains to point out that Jane Eyre is a very angry book, which primed me to focus on the restless, independent side of Jane's character, not the self-effacing Christian.

I think there's a popular misconception that Jane Eyre is nothing but a love story, but there's far more to it than that. Perhaps, if you read it at a time when romantic concerns are foremost in your mind, you will focus on the relationship between Jane and Rochester. But if you aren't preoccupied with romance, if what you seek is a sense of strength and self-worth despite misfortune—and especially if you are a woman—the novel has so much to offer in that vein. I am therefore grateful that Penguin Classics chose to promote the book with the quotation about self-respect, and not one of the more romantic or gothic passages of the novel. As I said, I'd probably never have reread it otherwise, and it would not now have a place in my heart.

Jane's voice is infectious; when I recently reread the novel again in anticipation of the new film version, its vocabulary got inside my head and caused me to talk and write like a Victorian. For instance, I found myself saying that I was "in low spirits" instead of "in a funk" or "depressed."

More and more, too, I find myself marveling at Charlotte Brontë's achievement—writing this long novel by hand, inventing this incredibly powerful and resonant story, sprinkling the text with rich patterns of imagery and themes. Now, not only do I try to be inspired by Jane's strengths and virtues, I also try to be inspired by Brontë's example. If she could write this novel by hand in less than a year, at a time when her sisters had already had their first books accepted for publication while her own was rejected—then there is no reason why I should complain about the difficulty of being a writer, nor fail to be as prolific as I wish.

The Brontës read extensively, and wrote stories and poems, to survive a harsh childhood and adolescence. The plot of Jane Eyre kicks into motion when young Jane slips away to read a book and is punished for it; and throughout the novel, she quotes and alludes to dozens of works of literature. Perhaps I will never have Charlotte Brontë's extraordinary writing talent, or Jane Eyre's sense of self and comfort with being alone (because I was lonely in France, though I tried my hardest to survive it). But one thing that these women and I will always have in common is that we take comfort from literature. Perhaps the pious Jane would take issue with my saying this, but for me, four years ago, her story was a secular, feminist scripture.