thirty

lists and freewriting

I recently read Rayne Fisher-Quann’s post about mistakes she made in 2024, and I’ve been mentally drafting a list of mistakes I made in my twenties. Here is what I have so far:

Mistakes from my 20s

• stayed far too long in relationships with men who were negligent, cruel, or who needed a mother rather than a partner

• paralyzed myself with my ambition and perfectionism, refusing to exercise my desire to write creatively until I was 28; was generally so afraid of failure that I could not be seen trying

• gradually became too comfortable being socially at ease, when I should have stood up for something instead

• failed to resist, at many opportunities, the urge to claw my way up a social ladder, making me act like a loser while overcorrecting for being an outcast as a child. Became addicted to friendship and acceptance, at the expense of integrity and internal validation

• casual sex. All of it

• certain body modifications. Really just my first professional tattoo, which is hideous, and the collarbone piercings that left little moon scars.

• did not consistently floss my teeth, and also believed that you were supposed to rinse your mouth after brushing

• left with grace when I should have razed everything to the ground

• was overly cruel on a few occasions where I felt able to address people who wronged me

• threw out a stack of journals from my early 20s because I was afraid my boyfriend would read them

• was financially irresponsible, ordered too many clothes from Urban Outfitters

• wasted a lot of money on undergraduate credits that did not count after I dropped out

• posted on Instagram way too much

• overvalued rich people’s approval

• did not update my address on my driver’s license for three or four years

• sh*plifted from self checkout (bad for my anxiety)

• strived for my family’s approval even though I can’t be the person they would want me to be

I’m sure there are many more mistakes I could add, but I think this is the gist of it. I struggled to balance integrity with desire, character with insecurity. I tried to do the right thing but I often fell short. Still, I think the decade had some wins.

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Things I think I got right:

• great story about losing my virginity (technically I was 19 but whatever)

• worked hard and did well in school; followed my passion rather than pursuing CS or some STEM bullshit I would have hated. Got my MA for free

• balanced socializing and making awesome memories with alone time and hard work

• had a lot of terrible minimum wage jobs (good for your humanity)

• volunteered with rape survivors for years

• didn’t even try to kill myself once; managed to stop self harming

• never got back with an ex or even entertained the idea

• returned to the things I loved as a kid (dance class and fantasy novels)

• didn’t get married or pregnant

• stayed vegan! stayed a leftist! became much more class conscious!

• surrounded myself with beautiful, inspiring, supportive friends, and maintained those friendships

• cool tattoos

• shaved my head

• got better and better at being authentic to myself

It’s a shorter list, but I think in the ledger of the past decade, the good outweighs the bad. I’ve been embarrassing and cowardly, but I’ve also been generous and virtuous.

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It’s my thirtieth birthday today and I feel fine. To take stock: I am wearing my favourite men’s Abercrombie & Fitch pants, a Zildjan tshirt (“The only serious choice.”TM), and a wine-dark cardigan my mom bought for me. I’m not wearing makeup to work like I said I would this year, but I am getting in the routine of applying perfume. I’m drinking a coffee and committing “time theft” at my administration job by writing this post. My boots are off under my desk.

I’m thinking about the Tom Thomson exhibition I went to see over the weekend at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery. My mom took me to see it after we had lunch at Subway. I don’t know if it’s just because I chafe at my mother’s attention, or because of my corrosive hangover from my party the night before, but I was in a bad mood. I walked around disdainfully, only thinking about how Thomson’s works looked exactly like every other Group of Seven-era Canadian oil painting, and wishing we had a better art gallery in this city. (I can say this because I used to work at the BAG during my undergrad, and also because I had already seen the other exhibition, Radical Stitch, two years ago in Hamilton.)

I think the reason I dislike that painting style is that it reminds me of the mass-produced art prints favoured by my grandparents. It’s conservative and ultimately pretty trad the way people in my family love the Group of Seven and their adjacent artists. And it’s not that the art is bad at all; it’s quite beautiful, but I struggle to appreciate the beauty, because that brand of Canadian painting just makes me feel repressed. It’s the only art you would ever see in Fredericton, New Brunswick, and I think that’s because the content is inoffensive and looks exactly like most New Brunswick backyards. I feel trapped by art that reaffirms the state of ignorance and poverty that I was raised in.

While exploring the exhibition, though, I do think I was able to shake my snobbery a little bit. (Not snobbery really, but a snobbish attitude evoked by insecurity and fear of regression, of never having heard of Jenny Holzer or Barbara Kruger or Leonora Carrington and thinking impressions of landscape are the height of art.) Thomson’s blues started to stand out to me as purer blues than I had ever acknowledged in nature. The blues sizzle on the canvas; they spit like bacon grease. And as you walk through his career chronologically, you see the maturity and self-assurance in his shapes, the convincing overflow of logs in a river, the spiral of pre-tempest clouds. The paintings are beautiful, and my weird baggage is inconsequential when dragged around the gallery from canvas to canvas. It’s only heavy in my arms; Thomson’s skies are too great and too impartial to notice it.

So I’m hoping that in the next decade, I’ll be able to look at myself and my baggage and my mistakes like I’m both a sky and its observer. I wrote this long, self-indulgent piece last year about how I need to get over myself and I’m obsessed with being provocative and different, and I very often hate myself and find the whole personhood fiasco exhausting. Being a sky and observing myself and trying to set down some of my fears feels like growth. And I need to start with the sky-being part, to get away from thinking about myself so much all the damn time.

Anyways, it’s been a good birthday. Today I got in a fight with a coworker and cried in my car, but it’s okay. I’m getting my back tattooed tonight. I’m safe and taking care of myself and I’m not alone.

Cheers,
Shan