getting into heaven

stop learning lessons that haven't been given to you!!!

I have a theory that being in your twenties is about feeling as though you’ve self-actualised whenever things are going better than anticipated, and then immediately crashing back down to Earth whenever something goes wrong. Teenagedom is its own special, turbulent category. Still childhood for all intents and purposes. When you hit twenty, you occupy a space where you’re learning so much for the first time, and it seems like it counts more than when you were sixteen. So every time you sense a great truth washing over you, typically if it’s amplified by the profundity of love- twenty-three years and it still feels ground breaking to me every time I tap into it- it’s like you’ve cracked something. You know and I know that we haven’t, not really. I think, if I am onto anything, that’s the key truth here. That we’re going to keep learning the same thing, over and over, and that’s the living part of this life. 

I typically stay away from age categorisations- sometimes it feels as though everyone feels the need to define their human experience by years, by generations, whereas I think the mishmash of stages myself and my friends find ourselves at show that the main unifying experience of being a twenty-something is that there is no unifying experience. Still, the phrase continues to capture a feeling of anticipation, an un-surefootedness. Overwhelm. Youth seems to align itself with the conviction that there is an absolute truth, a set of principles that can guide your behaviour. This can be incredibly useful, but I think we’ve taken it too far. We’re reaching Catholic heights of strictness about the most arbitrary of things. There’s a sense that we need to know everything there is to know, before it’s too late.

Obviously, it would be ridiculous to claim that Gen-Z are the first to seek knowledge and personal growth in their youth. There’s too much of an individuality complex already going on in the under-27s for that to be necessitated, and there aren’t as many clear cut lines between generations as we might think. The definition of youth often seems to lie more in life stage and levels of responsibility than with age. You could be thirty and living with parents, you could be a twenty-two year old parent who owns your own home. There’s little need to define yourself by the stage of development you sit at, like tweens discussing who has and hasn’t got their period yet. More importantly, it’s very human to want to learn more about your internal and external world. Some believe our capacity and desire to learn is what sets us apart from other species, some believe it’s what brings us closer to god. To experience is to learn, and most of us are highly driven by that want for experience, even if it’s towards different things.

In the deeply millennial but still relevant Girls S2E09, ‘On All Fours’, Lena Dunham’s character Hannah finds herself mostly solitary for once (except a seemingly orchestrated run in with her ex, Adam, played by Adam Driver). Fascinatingly, she attempts to clean her ear with a q-tip, and pushes it in too far, leading her to scream, cry on the floor, call her parents, and then take a trip to the ER alone. I don’t know if you’ve ever taken yourself to the hospital alone, but watching her do so brought back painful memories of lonely waiting rooms. There’s a loneliness to youth that seems to be conveyed best via comedy-drama. But what I mainly took away was the way that after experiencing immense pain, physical and emotional, and being concerned that she’d damaged her hearing, the episode closes with her sat on the edge of her bath in a baggy t-shirt, inserting a q-tip into her other, as of yet unperforated ear, as Daniel Johnston warbles in the background. 

It’s a show I watch partly for entertainment and partly to make me feel better about myself, but this felt a little too on the nose, especially considering I was procrastinating finishing this very piece (eating an ice cream on the sofa in my own baggy t-shirt) as I watched it. I’ve seen many describe Girls as essential viewing in your twenties, and this small moment seems to encapsulate why. As much as the girls in question are truly caricatures of train wrecks that I hope don’t mirror you or I, they carry an all-consuming refusal to learn and grow from their own actions and behaviours. In an ideal world, we’d all do this in a less public, destructive way than Marnie interrupting her ex’s office party to sing an acoustic cover of Kanye’s Stronger, but the point is clear- if you aren’t doing enough to embarrass yourself occasionally, you aren’t really living. I think of the many problems the show’s main group have, their scrappiness and tendency towards mistakes isn’t one. Their willingness to hurt people in the process is definitely a downfall of sorts, but their cobbling together of collective wisdom (most of which is wrong, even if it is imparted with love between friends) is something that I revel in when it comes to my own life.

A common theme I seem to see both online and in my personal circles (I’ll hold my hands up, mostly in myself) is the projection of understanding and self-awareness: I already know I’m making a mistake and I already know what you’re all going to think about it, therefore it’s fine. It has to have been on purpose. This seems entirely understandable, when we’ve created such a pressure to constantly grow and learn on a level whose reach exceeds anything that came before. I just think there’s nothing wrong with making a mistake to begin with. There isn’t and has never been a definitive good or bad, and whilst educating yourself on social issues or picking up some key skills are essential, that leaves a huge amount in between to figure out at your own pace. Equally, it feels as though we’re all trying to teach each other the lessons we’ve learned. Not share and discuss them, teach. As though it doesn’t take each of us making the same mistake five times over to learn it in the first place. There’s no merit in feeling frustrated at your friends for not taking advice you’ve never actually had to enact yourself, or had to go through great pain to learn.

This scene of Marnie coming home to find Hannah dancing alone and joining in was very special to me personally

We also seem to feel a need to rebuke our past choices, whether it was the way we wore our makeup or the people we dated. The often referenced idea that your prefrontal cortex (PFC) finishes developing at twenty-five is at least more based in fact than most pop-psychology you’ll see on TikTok. Where most of your brain typically finishes maturing in adolescence, it takes a while longer for the part whose role is to make decisions, so the development usually lasts until your mid-twenties. The part that weighs up cost-benefits, pros and cons, next moves, and whether that haircut really is a good idea. It’s why we associate poor impulse control and generally misguided decisions with younger people. If you’ve ever declined a fourth cocktail on your weeknight, that’s 1-0 to the PFC. Tap your forehead like you’re illicitly tapping the glass of a dormant zoo animal; that’s where it is, protected by less than a centimetre of skull.

Obviously, it’s not quite that simple. Like any trend that’s easy to repackage across social media (back in early 2023, so you could say I’m a little late), explaining your behaviours and feelings by the stage of PFC development you find yourself in isn’t exactly helpful. You don’t wake up on your twenty-fifth birthday with a fresh perspective on the world. Instead, you’re gradually exposed to complex personal and social situations that you maybe handle with fractionally more acumen, and in exchange further cranial development ensues. But your brain actually retains plasticity (the ability to adapt and grow pathways) throughout your lifespan, not just when you’re young. Your ways of seeing the world around you, your likes and dislikes, and even your personality have the capacity to change over time, not to mention the level of compensatory change it can achieve in the face of physical injury. Plus, you may find yourself aged twenty-one with a pretty much developed PFC, and then what are you going to blame the next four years of bad decisions on?

Obviously, you don’t just understand things more wholly later in life because your brain’s finished cooking. This is an unfortunate conclusion that’s gone as far as informing equally unfortunate policy, and reinforces the ways that we often dismiss young peoples’ insight. I’m hardly one for biological-reductionism: your level of understanding also increases because you’ve also experienced more. Of course it does. It’s one explanation as to why cranial development appears faster in adolescent girls than boys, because there are typically higher and often more complex social expectations for them. Interestingly enough, some researchers have observed a phenomenon where greater social media usage is associated with faster PFC development. What does any of this mean for our wider society? Not much, I’d argue. There’s more of a gap between legal adult and stereotypical adult than ever before; from 18 onwards paths are so diverging, with marriage and children happening much later for many, but also significantly less. In the subsequent episode of Girls (S2E10 ‘Together’) Hannah’s OCD relapse comes to a head, spurred on in part by a breakup and a distancing from her friends, and she also gives herself a terrible haircut (these things aren’t equally bad, but they’re none are good). She laments her situation to a neighbour:

“You know when you’re young and you drop a glass and your dad says, like, ‘get out of the way’ so you can be safe while he cleans it up? Well, now, no one really cares if I clean it up myself.”

There’s an argument to be made that being able to clear up after your own mistakes is vital, and while yes, you do need a substantial level of resilience to get by in the world, we’re social for a reason. You need people who can pick you up on a bad day, and sometimes people who can look at a way you’ve fucked up and tell you that it’s not actually that deep.

Outside my bedroom, on the roof below, there’s a crystal. Jade, roughly the shape of Bosnia and Herzegovina. I owned it for three weeks until everything started going wrong and I hurled it out of the window and things started to go right again. Or at least less wrong. Past tense is critical here: owned. It may still sit in my peripheral vision, getting rained on and tripping up foxes, but it’s not mine any more. You can do this, by the way. You can unclaim things even if you can’t get them away from you. It’s not that I actually believe the little piece of rock was responsible for anything, but if owning something is a symbol then discarding it can be too. Growing up I held myself to a military-like discipline in all aspects of my life, to the point where I ended my teen years occupying a level of asceticism that could leave the most staunch minimalist aghast. I was hallucinating an asterisk and trying to jump to anticipate a footnote that wasn’t there. Learning that there hadn’t ever been a need for that, other than to give myself structure, took a little while. This was mostly because if I let myself realise that there weren’t really any particular consequences for me not getting up at the crack of dawn or doing [insert any hideous ‘wellness’ practice you ever heard an influencer tout], I would have to recognise that the time had been wasted. Except (and this is a very neat bow to tie) it wasn’t. Because that itself was a learning. If whatever I’m doing right now is living life to the fullest, back then I was empty, but I was still living.

The Ancient Egyptians had Anubis, lord of the underworld, who, overseen by lord of the underworld Osiris, would weigh the heart of a dead man against a feather in the Hall of Two Truths to see which was heavier. The Ancient Greeks coined the term psychostasia, weighing of souls, it’s what medieval Christians believed St Michael would do on Judgement Day. None of them believed that you would be condemned if you hadn’t optimised your morning routine or remembered to return your parcels on time. You weren’t doomed to hell if you didn’t understand the compatibility of your love language with your partner’s, or drank coffee on an empty stomach a couple of times, even if you did it despite being told by a stranger on the internet not to. It feels as though we’ve moved past trying to explore for exploration’s sake, and into trying to figure out definitive truths about ourselves and the universe, whatever you believe the universe is. Belief systems, personal or institutional, are a very normal way to process the insanity of existence, but there’s no need to adhere to arbitrary rules. I promise nothing too bad will happen if you go to sleep with wet hair or never learn your Kibbe body type. We know that it’s all made up- even if it’s helpful sometimes, it’s made up. You can eclipse the parts of your life that make it fun and worthwhile (and pay a bunch of money) to look or feel or ‘be’ 0.5% better, if you want. It’s not quite the same as just living, though. And you’re not above accidentally upsetting a friend or miscommunicating with your family, that’s part of life- there’s nothing holy in moralising every aspect of your life.

Anubis (right) weighing a head against the feather of Maat

And you truly can’t turn every experience you have into a lesson, or you’ll drive yourself mad. Not everything needs to be steeped in meaning, sometimes things are just sensation and happenstance. It’s fun to see the allegory, the star-alignment, but you don’t need to use that to add a page to your rule book. I’ve been reading Hungry for What at a local haunt on the sleepy, sunny Sunday evenings I seem to find myself engulfed by recently. The glass of white wine on the table and jazz that floats over from the front of the pub is a stark contrast to the horrific short stories that unfold within- I can’t recommend it enough. One such story, about a young woman who has a breakdown following the end of a relationship, and ends up moving into a tent in the woods to get away from the society she’s expected to participate in, stood out to me. It ended with her collecting non-perishable food and hammering in tent poles, before encountering a bear:

“The bear steps back and withdraws its neck, which flattens like hindquarters against the ground, and tenses so forcefully it seems about to explode [...] And just before the first swipe slices her skin from shoulder to hip, it occurs to her that there’s a very important lesson here, a metaphor for something, which she must surely learn.”

- ‘Notre-Dame Gone to Ashes’ from Hungry for What by María Bastarós.

I couldn’t shake this story for days, despite it being, by design, significantly less haunting than many of the others. The absurdity of trying to learn a lesson from your imminent, violent demise played on loop in my head. There are some lessons you learn once and hopefully never repeat the mistakes of. ‘Your loved ones won’t be around forever’ springs to mind. So does ‘paying off student loans is a scam unless you’re rich’. But otherwise, no one’s counting. No one’s keeping tabs on how well you’re doing, and if they are they probably have bigger problems to worry about. There isn’t a manual, there isn’t a key to everything, and if there was it wouldn’t be in an Amazon bestseller or a juice recipe. You’re not a few mantras away from your ideal self- if anything, your ideal self doesn’t exist. You’re a mass of decisions, not a human set of weighing scales balancing from side to side. You’re a ball of energy moving through the streets at your own pace. Not a born-condemned being forever outrunning your own incompetence, and trying to prove that it never happens. 

Take it all to its natural conclusion. Is the absolute worst case scenario really that bad? Is it something you really can’t handle? Is there even a consequence, really? And do you need to prevent yourself from making every minor mistake that you haven’t even made yet? I’m deeply averse to the idea of knowing what I’m doing this early in what I hope will be a long and full life. I have no desire to know it all now, or to pretend I do. I want it to unfurl in front of me, slowly, tentatively, over decades. Connecting dots is some of the most fun you can have, the feeling of things clicking into place where before there was a void is almost biological. Not that there’s any shortage of things to learn, but why would I want to know it all now? When it comes to the interpersonal, the profound, bordering on spiritual life lessons and truths about yourself, there’s no need to rush. Take on the feedback you get from the world, but you don’t need to find yourself neck deep in self-help and navel gazing, so much so that you take a step back from the living itself. Most of your actions won’t have consequences that are that huge, and sometimes even the huge consequences aren’t good or bad, particularly in their reflection of you. They’re just the next pages. They’re all just threads. 

---

thank you so much for reading <3 if you enjoyed this and want to support me to be able to keep writing, you can buy me a coffee here :)