#9 "Have I turned boring?"

The loss of old joys and the wins of unsexy maturity

Good morning!

Last month, my friend Ally who’s also in her late twenties shared with me her year-end reflection. I had known about her buying a new car and condo unit, but apparently, she had a lot of other adulting endeavors. She had her home’s roof repaired. She initiated pest control services for her whole compound. And, soon—” The scariest responsibility of them all”—she might have to assume management of her family’s small bakery, on top of her day job.

I admired her even more after knowing about all those big-ticket grown-up things. Needless to say, Ally was proud of herself, too! But she couldn’t help but be saddened by one thing: the thought of letting go of being a child.

“I feel like this is the end of my childhood and I’m getting REALLY OLD.” She expounds:

I feel like I’m turning into a boring person. I don’t go out and let myself get wasted anymore and I’m usually the first to leave the party. I’m like Cinderella who goes home at midnight, and then I think to myself, “Have I turned boring?” I’m not who I used to be. I’m a bit more choosy with what I spend my time on. It’s so mature. :( And I need advice that that’s okay because it feels pretty sad.

As I’ll explain more later, I’m grateful Ally talked about this because I realized it was something I, myself, needed to unpack. So for this edition, I’m doing just that.

This is a two-part newsletter answering: What happens when we outgrow things? What is the real beauty of maturity?

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Me, during my #danceislyf era

The end of an era

Back in college, in a Psychology class, our professor asked us to map out our self-concept. It was pretty elementary homework: write your name at the center of a piece of paper, then add spokes for the things that form your “self”. That is, how do you perceive yourself? What do you identify as? What are your dominant traits and characteristics?

I’d written “daughter”, “sister”, “business student” among other things, but when I had the chance to share my self-concept map, the first thing I said was “I’m a dancer.” By then, I’d been dancing almost throughout my adolescence. I was super active in my university’s dance team. United in our obsession, my teammates and I would quip “#danceislyf”. Calling myself a dancer felt like the truest, surest, most obvious thing about me, and I couldn’t fathom a future where dance didn’t play a significant role in my life. I was just too invested. It was too much of who I was.

Maybe you can see where this is going. Today, six years later, I rarely take dance classes. I still watch dance videos and follow the community, but I just don’t crave it anymore.

This didn’t suddenly happen. Looking back, in the years after graduation, I tried hard to keep dancing regularly and to keep improving, as I’ve done over the years—but I realize now that a huge part of why I did that wasn’t because I still felt the fire for it, but because it just felt so unlike me to not be passionate about it.

When we talk about mourning, it’s usually over tangible losses like when a loved one dies or when a relationship ends. But as it turns out, grief applies to the death or loss of anything that mattered dearly to us. Of anything that we once frequently turned to for joy or that made us feel alive or at home. Small or big, it doesn’t matter—the thing has become integral to our self-concept, so losing it for whatever reason entails a change in our psyche—and that can feel weird and disorienting and inexplicably saddening.

After reading Ally’s reflection, it hit me that I hadn’t taken the time to sit with how this has played out in my recent life.

In 2022, as the world resumed its regular programming, I found myself on a wavelength that was drastically different from my pre-pandemic self. I’ve written about all these inner changes elsewhere (here and here), but in a nutshell: As a once social butterfly ENFP Type A hustler dancer, I am no longer much of these things.

☔ @cosyluv

plans: *cancelled* me:

You would’ve thought that I’d revenge-socialize or revenge-work (my former workhorse self really would have). But, like Ally, relative to my pre-pandemic self, I’ve also become… a boring person. My idea of a solid Friday night is to hole up in my fluffy sheets while reading a book, my room enveloped in the scent of some shamelessly expensive vanilla-scented candle. On any night, I’ll go out for as long as I can be sure I’ll be fully functional to write at 8 AM the next day. All hail Cinderella.

But even then, I always struggled to make these decisions. I felt conflicted between honoring my social butterfly ENFP Type A hustler dancer self and, well, whoever I am today. Prioritizing different things—making different choices—has made me feel like a foreigner in my own body. Sometimes I even feel a bit of guilt—like I’m going off script and I’m being dishonest. But I realize now that that couldn’t be further from the truth; it just takes a while to get used to your “new self.” And I reckon it gets easier when you let yourself acknowledge what you’re leaving behind, like what Ally did.

Maybe it’s the fact that we’re nearing the end of our “defining decade” that makes all these inner changes feel so definitive. (Ironically, even as we’re leaving our childhood, I still feel like we’re entering something that feels only sorta kinda hopefully like adulthood.) But I wanted to speak more broadly about this because I feel that this “I’m not who I used to be” feeling is something we’ll have to contend with—in varying degrees—for the rest of our lives.

It’s brought naturally by life stages. It happens, perhaps even more profoundly, when a terrifying invisible thing that sounds like Schmovid sweeps the world and traps us in our homes indefinitely, forcing us to grapple with our mortality, our shadow selves, and our personal definition of a meaningful life. In this ever-evolving life, maybe we’ll always be mourning something of the past: an old habit, old priority, old trait, old core value, old joy, old dream, old motivation.

It’s sad to see that something that was once integral to your sense of self or happiness now feels less potent or has lost its potency altogether. That something I used to equate to my life, and willfully go out of my way for, is now the last thing on my list.

But I like to remember that grieving is also a kind of cherishing. And the things we cherish make us who we are. So in a way, maybe the idea of leaving things behind or moving on or letting go or breaking away need not have that sense of finality. Because, ultimately, my love for dance—as with all things of my past—has weaved itself into the tapestry of my present self.

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Ready na po ako for more mature roles, direk

(I’m ready for more mature roles, director)

After watching the Argentina-France World Cup final, I came across a piece in The Atlantic about Messi’s “late-style triumph” or how he, despite his age, performed at the level that he did and brought home the championship. Because apparently, at 35 years old, he’s considered a geriatric in soccer. His speed just doesn’t exist anymore. (Meanwhile, his French rival Mbappe—24 years old and well into soccer puberty— is so inconceivably fast that, as The Sporting News writes, he “might be more jackal than human.”)

So without the legs to carry him, Foer wrote, “Messi economized his movements”:

Rather than pretending that he was a young man, he played like an older one. He ambled through games, saving himself for the moments that he could assert himself. He showed a remarkable awareness about how he might be able to parcel out his dwindling corporeal self, how he needed to make choices about when to give himself fully.

(With “dwindling corporeal self”, you would’ve thought he was some shriveled-up old man.)

Anyway, the piece was titled The Lionel Messi Guide to Living. And fittingly so. I was particularly struck by that last sentence because I thought it contained so much truth about what it means to be grown-up and to go far in life: You learn to make choices about when to give yourself fully.

It’s exactly what Ally said: we become more choosy.

Or I think a better way to say it is: we become more deliberate with how we spend our time. And money. And energy.

I think this whole aging or adulting or maturity thing gets a bad rap because there’s this notion that you somehow lose life as you grow older. Compared to our childhood, these mellower, more controlled days seem like a loss of vitality. But the truth is, it’s just not a fair comparison: Back then, we were operating under different rules, with a different make. Messi may be the GOAT, but in this sense, he’s just like all of us.

For me, I’ve found that life has only felt fuller when I’ve been forced to grow up in some way. Finally, I realized that I’d been living as if the world revolved around me, that indefatigability is a mirage, that I have more to gain by embracing my limitedness, that every choice has a trade-off, that many things I once thought about myself or how the world should work aren’t necessarily true, that, surprisingly, there’s joy to be found in the details and the mundanity of everyday living, that the years humble me and build clarity in ways that being young, frenzied, and freewheeling just can’t.

@annabrandberg on all the apps 🐝 @annabrandberg

When I was a child, I thought the "adult drink" was coffee. When I became a teenager, I thought the "adult drink" was beer. As an adult, I've realised the "adult drink" is in fact... water.

As we get older, we get less sexy things in exchange for deeper, more gratifying things. With less eventful days, we are rewarded with more mindful ways. And it begins to dawn on us that, while being self-centered feels good, we are called to choose to live and succeed for some form of “other”. A partner, family, dog, community, or cause. Whatever it is, it’s our decision to share our talents and good fortune that gives us a sense of purpose. An avenue to do or become part of something bigger than ourselves. A chance to feel what may be the heartiest kind of fulfillment.

“In Qatar 2022, it was poignant to see how far [Messi] had traveled as a human being.” Over the years, he seems to have become a “complete” player. A true playmaker who learned to assume “a leadership style that suited him.” As Foer wrote, “He took responsibility for his team while never acting as if he transcended his team. And his leadership was, in a sense, a form of healing.”

Now I know we can’t all be the best-ever in our own fields (pun intended). But if that is the kind of behavior that maturity can galvanize, I welcome it with open arms.

If you liked this, help your girl out & like this post! Or share it if you think it might resonate with someone else. You can also comment on the post or reply to this email. In any case, it’ll really motivate me! (which I definitely need, lol) ♡