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By coincidence or at the hand of fate, life milestones cluster. That’s what I told myself every other weekend, when I’d put on a cute new outfit and eat charcuterie with friends of friends at yet another 30th birthday party. I suspect it’s what I’ll tell myself every other weekend one day, when I put on the same black twinset and eat charcuterie with friends of friends at yet another funeral.
From conception through to natural death, it’s some comfort to know that we’re never alone in our experiences for long. We grow eyeballs around the same time as our peers, we take our first breaths, hold our heads up, learn to walk, learn to talk, become enthralled with shrill and repetitive children’s programming seemingly designed to test our parents’ will to live, go to school, lose teeth, discover mood swings, discover independence, and start our lives. One moment we are little zygotes, the next we’re sweating through our Reformation dresses at unseasonably warm winery weddings.
Credit: Robin Cowcher
Part of this is cultural. Our society has distinct comings of age, markers of progression into adulthood: big birthdays, first homes, first loves, big achievements, and most often, we follow the path that is laid out for us. Why deviate from the plan? Why disrupt a seemingly natural order?
Part of it is even subcultural: we’re little better than nervous cavoodles at the dog park, more comfortable around our own kind. I’m a career-orientated thirty-something creative type, so most of my friends are too. Couples connect with couples, parents connect with parents: these communities we form are affirming, convenient, built for survival. Who is going to tell you about oatmeal baths for your baby’s eczema if not other parents? Who’s going to tell us what an open bar is going to cost us if not someone whose 21st birthday falls in January? Without community, we’re just floating through space, hoping we crash into something solid. Trailblazers, we salute you.
A high achiever to the point of destruction, there have been a few times I’ve been ahead of the curve. I was the first in my peer group to leave home, to overload my timetable and graduate uni, to move overseas, to move back, to get a grown-up job, to start a little life. I’m framing it like a brag, but a lot of it was really difficult. Not real-world difficult, like living in an internment camp or fighting a degenerative disease, but just… lonely. Oftentimes, I think this lifelong commitment to blazing the trail is why I write. It’s a way to turn my experiences and life lessons into a survival guide for someone younger and smarter than me.
We’re not just celebrating the good stuff together.
Dog heaven must have been a little empty, because mine died three months ago, and he has been on a recruitment campaign ever since. Recently, two of my closest friends’ dogs died within five days of one another. The tyrant corgi I spent my whole adulthood orbiting around evidently pulled some strings in the afterlife and took them off our planet to keep him company. I am so grateful to have the experience and empathy available to give them, but an ugly part of me resents having to forge that trail alone.
Next it will be babies, then more babies. There will be an exodus from the inner suburbs when they all scramble to afford a property with a yard. Next, there will be divorce parties and second marriages. Midlife crises. Trips to silent retreats. High school graduations and weddings and baby showers again, this time for a generation so new we haven’t even given them a letter yet. Soon, much sooner than we think, the people in my age bracket will begin losing their parents, and then their spouses, and then themselves. I don’t want to be the leader any more. For once, I want to be a follower.
Maybe it’s by design. We’ve been told that chronic loneliness is as good for us as smoking 15 cigarettes a day, and twice as deadly as obesity. Isn’t it pretty to think that the universe, not as indifferent as I like to believe on my most nihilistic days, has structured our fates to align cleanly with those of our favourite people? In moments of big joy and bottomless sadness, it’s nice to feel a hand on our shoulder and hear a whisper in our ears: You’re not alone. You’re not alone. You’re not alone.
If something hasn’t happened to you yet, it will. It’s almost certainly imminent.
If something has happened to you already and the loneliness of it is too big to swallow, just breathe through your nose for a moment: someone will meet you on this road soon.
Life milestones cluster, and I can’t wait to share all my joys and heartbreaks with you.
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