Being young and naïve

easily! here and now.

Back home in my childhood bedroom. I’ve cut my hair so short, it hasn’t been this short since I was 5 years old. I’m shedding some sag, feeling more nimble. I wore jeans and ballet slippers. My flexibility has improved. I am being young and naïve.

I am young and naïve as I build a career in a hungry and infamous industry. As I eat too many multi-vitamins, gummy and sweet. I feel free when I leave my phone inside and go for a bike ride, but I see the world has changed, there are less kids playing in the yards, even on a warm and sunny autumn day.

When I really was a child, I hated art museums and history lectures and broccoli and non fiction. Now I love all of those things, plus the things I always loved, like Daft Punk and Miley Cyrus and petting dogs and playing soccer and video games. I expanded, and my capacity for enjoyment did too.

My parents still call me sweetheart and lovedove. I still go by the same nickname. I still respond to my manipulative ex, because I get a thrill from it. I’m still chasing a thrill. Like a child.

I feel older, and younger too. There are a lot of great songs women have written about this happening to them. The best part of aging healthily, it seems, is experiencing the ecstatic fun of youthful whimsy while also knowing way more about yourself and the world. Now I know about skin care, Spanish, permaculture, and Peter Paul Rubens. I also know about how to disagree, bravely.

I am a kid, a woman. I am alive as ever, I am dying. I am rallying hard against anyone who tries to convince me that these things contradict. “naïve” is the word that flashes across my brain sometimes during these little rallies I hold. “jaded” is an attitude I witness others grow into. I easily continue to believe instead in my beating hopeful heart.

♡

(I can’t get into right now just how much I’ve been tripping out from staying informed. Maybe if the future wasn’t so poorly forecasted, I’d curiously venture more into jadedness, pessimism, over-analysis, intellectual elitism. That seems counterintuitive, but it’s not. Some things, like those, can wait for a time when time is more guaranteed. It just so happened that during this period in history that is my youth, it’s not. So I dance in my bedroom and blow a kiss to my reflection and romanticize a trip to the mall and do all this in the name of enjoyment. It’s an act of rebellion. Revolution by way of optimism against-the-odds. I do not go gentle into that good night by going, smiling, into that good night.)

♡

“She is one of the most joyful girls I have seen in a long time, her glance is so childlike and yet forthright, her nature so charming, so pure, and yet she is curious.”
-Soren Kierkegaard