Dancing with the decaying corpse of young adulthood

I have likened the experience of approaching your thirties to doing the waltz with the decaying corpse of your young adulthood. She drinks too much, forgets to pay the rent on time and wants to eat pasta for breakfast. You drag her around knowing that she is dead but you refuse to let go in case she is suddenly reanimated with the romantic effervescence that once coloured your life together. 

You cling to her in the hopes she is proof that you are not becoming a serious and boring adult, but you can also no longer ignore that you are now frightened of nightclubs and that you would rather be trapped inside a sarcophagus with bugs crawling under your skin than have to spend one more second of your wild and precious life uselessly jabbering away in the smokers section.

Ophelia by Sir John Everett Millais (1851)

The decaying corpse of your young adulthood causes troubles in your life, as you still vividly feel the trauma of what had happened to her but simultaneously feel so separate from it, annoyed by it, because it was all so long ago that it shouldn’t be a problem anymore. Yet she is still hanging off of you, with one eyeball popping out of her head, reminding you of the pain she went through, how sad and alone she was, how defenceless she was against it all. 

You feel sorry for her so you let her take up the space next to you, and spend your time feeling uncomfortable in social situations hoping that people will politely ignore the half of you that is rotting away.

You are tired from carrying all the extra weight. You can see your potential in the hazy future, a version of you who reads paper books before sleep and can meet new people without stuttering and forgetting what to say, but there is no space for her yet. You wish that she would slip off easily, like a snake shedding its skin, so you can move on with your life. 

Erik Thor Sandberg

Lead by a dry mouthed enthusiasm, young adulthood is all about messy indecision, giving into your lower instincts and puffing your chest up as the person you think you should be.

Growing up is granting yourself the serenity to be uncool, to deny your flavour of hedonism in favour for a more nourishing ordinary experience, and giving up on grandiose fantasies that cast a shadow over the simple and beautiful aspects of your everyday life.

But by letting go of your young adulthood, the one who takes up so much space, there will be an indeterminate period of time that is spent getting acquainted with the emptiness that resides in you. The very same feeling you spent so many years trying to cover up and pretend you didn’t know existed.

The prospect is frightening enough to cause you to clutch onto her. You hope that the dance will flow easily from one partner to the next. You desperately hope you never have to hold your empty hands out in the darkness to realise no one is there. But it happens. And you know you have to take the next steps alone. 

You know that something is over, something you cannot get back. 

ringingcedarsofrussia.org

You must lay her to rest in order for new things to grow. You must accept that you are grieving and that you have lost something that was important to you. Embrace the stillness, the silence, the weightlessness that comes from letting go. Stretch. 

The peacefulness death brings leads you realise that you were the one dragging her out of her grave. You were the one not letting her sleep. She had been trying to go quietly but you wanted something from her, something she was no longer able to give.

As you bravely waltz alone, the shadows on the sidelines transform into faces. One by one, you see hundreds of versions of your own face watching you, patiently waiting to be asked:

“May I have this dance?”

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