I’ve decided that I’ll be 29 for the next 20 or 30 years I may have left to bang around on this planet. When I was 29, I was able to hold a thought for days at a time and the most FOMO stress I was under was that blinking red light voicemail light on the phone.
I found this photo while I was cleaning out some old files. It is a corporate profile photo that they made us take every year for the annual reports, the sales brochures, the “here is your executive team so you can fake say ‘hi’ to them when you see them in the halls” handouts for the board of directors. I used to wear a tie every day with a starched shirt, shave twice a day, shine my shoes, write with a Montblanc pen, fill up Franklin Planners…. the whole gig.
Weekends were for outings with family, spending the entire day at The Beach Waterpark without a phone. Sunday nights were spent either traveling for a Monday meeting or getting the calendar sorted for the week ahead.
Now, Sunday is just a marker day from how far behind I am from everybody else. Sunday is a day where everyone else sits down to their desks and realizes they don’t have what they need to pull ahead from the pack. Sunday is the day when everyone else gets to call me in a panic to get them that file, write that module, fix that code, email them that logo file.
Nope. Not gonna do it anymore.
I am 29 for the rest of my life and Sundays are mine for the same. If that makes you want to go work with someone else, fine… go make their lives miserable.
I lied by omission when I first hit publish on this story. What I really am tired of is being scared of getting sick and old in a country that throws away its ‘experienced’ members. I’m tired of carrying the burdens of remembering more and more of my history. I’m exhausted with paying the tax that relationships place on me. I’m terrified of being poor once again in a country that doesn’t really care about the poor, homeless, disabled and old. I’m sick of the sneers that ageism entitles young people; the hubris at having the entirety of human knowledge — including the collective cultural history of America — at their fingertips but refusing to look it up or learn it. I’m exhausted at having a lifetime of experience being dismissed. I’m enraged at how I am shoved into a category of selfish, brutal and uncaring simply because I was born between two arbitrary years. I’m tired of having to maintain a life that shackles me while I watch others move about, unencumbered but enabled by the life I maintain. I’m tired of being the battery that fuels the dreams of others. When I was 29, I was unwittingly making choices that fashioned the chains I now wear…
Who knows, maybe Taylor Swift will eventually write that song, Feeling 29.
Feels like a perfect day to dress up like bankers and make fun of our tie choices.
More coffee?
Ok, fine… if you read this whole thing AND watched the Taylor Swift video, I probably owe you are peek at the full frontal photo.
