In lieu of New Year’s Resolutions, I offer this piece I wrote in honor of my birthday last spring:
30 Things I Learned by 30
- If you tell Creative Writing students they can write about nonhuman characters, one of them will write a tragedy about the doomed love between a pencil and an eraser, and it will be worlds sadder than anything Shakespeare ever dreamed of.
2. When you go to write down what you’ve learned, you will always gravitate toward what your students taught you.
3. For someone obsessed with other people’s stories, you will grow to find your own family history more and more fascinating.
4. You will always be more comfortable on one side of an interview than the other.
5. Learning about the world, for you, nearly always means learning about yourself first.
6. It is often difficult to silence the voices in your mind.
7. All voices grow louder in silence.
8. That is why the inner monologue seems particularly insistent in the dark hours where night becomes morning. That is also why it’s so powerful to be the one person with your hand raised.
9. One day, you’ll read an analysis of self-talk and realize with startling clarity that not everyone has a running monologue in their brain.
10. Of the many brilliant pieces you will come to admire Tina Fey for, the episode in which Alec Baldwin’s Jack Donaghy gets busted for narrating his inner pep talk on a live mic is the one that will hit closest to home.
11. You will become increasingly aware of the absence of female voices in the world, and therefore more and more grateful for women who refuse to hold their tongues.
12. Feminist is the identity you hold the most dear and are simultaneously the most conflicted about.
13. Growing up in the D.C. suburbs, the granddaughter of a CIA agent and a diplomat, will forever shape your worldview in ways you will take decades to recognize.
14. Your AP History teacher was right about Sept. 11: We knew immediately that it would change the world, but we could never predict how.
15. “I grew up Catholic” will become your preferred shorthand for a tangle of religious and social beliefs, only the second of which will stick.
16. The social beliefs ingrained in your soul through a Catholic upbringing will mainly come to be defined in your life through rebellion.
17. It is true what they say about mothers: all women become their mothers; that is both our blessing and our curse.
18. While your mother’s feminism has always appeared as much a central fact about the world as its roundness, it will take you 28 years to appreciate how much of a feminist your father is.
19. You will never feel done.
20. You will fail to understand how other people achieve a phase of life in which they feel satisfied in their own accomplishments.
21. You will reject all notions of zen thought under the grounds that desire is an extraordinarily beautiful part of what makes us human.
22. You will become increasingly comfortable asking questions, but asking for what you want will remain a difficult task.
23. You will realize that analyzing yourself from the outside brings a perspective that is frequently disquieting.
24. You will learn that listening is the most underrated of skills.
25. You will redefine the word “kids” in shifting relation to your personal and professional status.
26. You will frequently prefer the company of those young enough to unthinkingly challenge social norms.
27. You will spend an extraordinary amount of mental and emotional energy grappling with what social norms you want to adhere to and an equal amount of effort struggling with your role in enforcing social norms for others.
28. One of your biggest bones of contention with the general population of America will be our tendency to use “intellectual” as a pejorative term.
29. You will spend a lot of your life figuring out how to be grounded, pragmatic, and relatable when relaying political or literary truths.
30. The concept of truth is the ever elusive ideal you will chase so long that illusive will come to feel the more accurate descriptor.
Elizabeth DeOrnellas 