Reflections on 27
I am currently living in a two-bedroom flat by the water just south of Sydney. I am surrounded by old Greek men and their lawn bowls, women in hijabs with their picnic baskets, and Indian newlyweds who seem to spill from the doors of the restaurant-cum-wedding venue across the road every time I walk past.
Old men in unbranded slides gather at the chicken shop with their beer in the afternoons and young people in their lowered cars and piercing exhausts race up and down my street late at night. I have befriended neighbours who have gifted me with lemon trees and sold me their washing machines and asked, with wonder in their eyes, if I am a horticulturalist because of the root powder I keep on my windowsill. In a wonderful turn of events, the flat above mine is also home to my best friend from high school and her partner, thus fulfilling all the romanticised dreams of my girlhood.
I have curated a space that I love coming home to and a space I am proud of. There are 7 green tomatoes ripening on a vine on my balcony and lettuce leaves ready to pick. Buddy Holly is sitting in my record player. I have tasteful nudes on the walls and penis sculptures on the shelves and after 8 years and 11 share-houses, everything in the kitchen drawers is finally mine. I don’t mind that it is an apartment and that I have no backyard. Living alone was my priority, and this was the most affordable option available.
I spend most of my days in an office with my team, running a small but successful communications agency. We laugh a lot, and despite all of the fears I had in my early-20s, sitting behind a computer screen in a white-walled office isn’t all that bad when you’re doing what you love and in control of shaping the life you want to live.
At night, I spread my uni readings across my dining table and slowly work away at a Master of Public Policy at the University of Sydney. Doing a subject or two at a time means that I can sink into the content and I can perform well in assignments. I have found a flow with study that was never there during my undergraduate degree and it feels more like joy and less like scrubbing Vaseline out of school pants.
I am finally earning enough to pay tax, after many years living below the poverty line and stressfully scraping dollars from the bottom of old handbags for KFC. A fulfilling meal at fast food once felt more financially accessible than buying raw ingredients at Coles and cooking up something healthy at home. I have learned a lot since then.
However, the more money I earn, the more I feel I need. Suddenly, I have more expenses, more activities that require money rather than two legs and a pair of shoes good enough to walk in. The luxuries that come with earning a full-time wage as a single woman seem exorbitant and boring. I have a ute, a 1998 Holden Rodeo, so I don’t need to take public transport anymore. I don’t have conversations with strangers at the station and I don’t accidentally fall asleep on people’s shoulders on buses. I take my bike to the bike shop to get serviced and the man tells me it will cost $100, so I smile and say, ‘no worries’ and I pick it up a day later instead of skill-sharing with someone who kind-of-knows bikes up the road. It is convenient, and a privilege.
With money, I am more aware of the flaws in my body because I have a disposable income available to fix them: laser hair removal, a haircut with a treatment because my hair is dry and brittle, maybe a facial to make my skin glow. I go to the dentist for check-ups rather than when I have a pain in my tooth. I have a gym membership: $8.80 a week, every week.
Most of my friends have been working full time for 7 years, earning significantly more than me, and I am flabbergasted at how much money they must have. I feel guilty emerging in the world of salary-earners. I feel like I have betrayed my working-class Centrelink-reliant roots. It’s easy to criticise capitalism when you’re not benefiting from it as much as others. It’s easy to forget those criticisms when you’ve been offered opportunities to thrive in it.
Despite the apartment, the business, the studies, despite the rich and nourishing friendships that have taught me new ways to live and love, I am more anxious than I have ever been. My obsession with control has prevented me from settling into uncertainty with patience. Particularly when other people are in the picture. How can you trust that they will be there long term? How do you know that what they tell you is true, when after 22 years of believing the Christian narrative, told to you by people you loved and trusted, turned out to be false? How do you know that the people you share your physical space with won’t take advantage of you, like the small handful of men in my life who did? I find it impossible to be in a relationship with another without knowing how it will end, and without the certainty that I can trust them.
The other day, on a date in a kitchen in Sydney, I told a man I had been feeling lonely. He smiled and scoffed and said, ‘but you’re only 26!’. I wanted to tell him that there should be no shame in feeling lonely, but instead I sat there, feeling ashamed anyway. Feeling lonely seems to be a flaw in character, an inability to ‘be okay on your own’, something only permissible for bachelors over 50. Such an individualistic society rewards those who build islands for themselves. But it is community that heals and community that makes a home a home. Surely you can inhabit both spaces?
On the phone to Chloe this morning, I expressed this pang of loneliness, and my anxiety that only seems to arrive when I have emotionally invested in something I cannot control. It has become a detrimental and heartbreaking catch-22. We spoke about the ways that we, like many trauma survivors, protect ourselves, and how much easier it is to haul the bricks onto our backs and push on and on and on always moving always going always being better, just us, nobody else, no risks we cannot control. I need to learn to sit in that discomfort without expecting a stranger to carry the burden of that anxiety for me. That is what friendship is there for.
Today, I am 27. I am listening to Flourishing by Tom Rosenthal and reading Promiscuities, An Opinionated History of Female Desire by Naomi Wolf and I am writing my final paper this semester on the inherent discrimination of algorithm-driven platform censorship on marginalised groups with assigned female bodies. My bags are packed, and I am planning on spending the weekend in the Snowy Mountains with two women I have never met.
I am coming to terms with the complexity and intensity of my character, the resentment that arrives when you realise the ways your parents have inevitably failed you (no matter how wonderful they are), and the extent of my privilege in the world. I am always writing, always reading, and always seeking to understand myself better so that I can make a more informed contribution to the world. This year, I hope to learn how to rest, and how to delight in the uncertainty of other humans.