welcome back to australia, me! i have started the year by having the most hair raising set of interactions and events. i should probably stop drinking coffee.

dating

im in my late 20s, but because im not married with children and because my work is pretty low stress most of the time, im freely able to experience The Live Arts pretty regularly in my city. i love going to gigs and gallery openings, poetry nights and high octane house parties. as a result, some of my closest friends are also the kinds of people that haunt these spaces, and they fit an age range that spans the whole of the twenties (and some a little into their thirties). i'm closest with the ones closest to me age-wise because we're at a similar point in our lives, but i also have awesome friendships with some people who are much younger. i dont see how this could possibly bite me in the ass as a single person

i recently got hit up out of nowhere by someone on instagram. they had about ten mutual friends and seemed pretty nice - i asked them if we'd met at a live show and they said briefly and that they wanted to get to know me better. sweet! we were chatting a bit and i mentioned a mutual friend. they say "oh, i love <mutual friend>, we went to the same high school!". the mutual friend is 22. i held onto faint hope that they were maybe a couple of grades separated from each other, but after talking to the mutual friend, they were indeed in the same class. i had to cut that one off

i met someone else at a recent poetry night! they seemed really nice and were a full time programmer, so they can't be that young, i thought. they asked me for my instagram and their page had a lot of cool art on it as well. professional and creative? what a score! we hung out the other night and a tertiary friend of theirs asked both our ages to give context to a story. there was an eight year difference. sigh. at least with this person we both seemed to realise that yeah that was probably a bit much and we just had a mellow platonic night

jumping into dating in my late 20s has taught me that, to some degree, age is just a number, and that life experience and your life stage is generally more important, but despite my late bloomer status dating someone quite that young feels pretty icky. in any case, that's the last of the (recent) early 20-ers having a go that i've had to navigate. but what's this? theres one more paragraph in this section! i wonder what that means?

the day after valentines i headed to a massive party with a bunch of friends and people i know from around town. the inherent vibe of the night was pretty horny but i was happy to just take it easy, meet some new people and just get drunk with my friends. i plopped myself down next to someone i'd seen around once or twice and had a really good chat, and found out they were also genderqueer! and my age! and really attractive! we decided we should catch up again next week and went our separate ways into the party. by the time it hit 2.30 i'd sobered up pretty cleanly and was talking to a friend (friend x) who reminded me why this person was familiar - theyd had a couple of dates with another friend (friend y) and had only broken it off a couple of weeks ago. great. i cant find friend y at the party, so i give the new person a lift home so i can clear the air. i drop them off, and they say friend y was just a couple of dates and it wasnt really anything from their perspective. friend y doesnt agree, and the next day informs me that im barred from visiting their house or going to their gigs. stellar. can a bitch get a fucking break??

mental health

at the end of january i had my last session with my psychologist - i've struggled with rumination for years now, and i really wanted to get a grip on it. my japan trip for it was particularly bad, where i had two big spells, the first triggered by a conversation with my ex, and the second me simply overthinking where i even fit in the world as a single person. this should not be a surprise to anyone who's read my last couple of monthly blogs

my psych told me that while these suck, she thinks i have good coping mechanisms and a good support network and that i shouldnt be worried. she sent me away with not quite a clean bill of health, but more a statement that she wasn't the person who would be able to fix my obsessive issues. i'm thinking that, well, i don't think im fixed, but a medical professional thinks my mental state isnt a big enough issue and i should be able to handle it for now

then comes the events of the last month. discussing the most recent incident has been super interesting. one friend said that they somewhat forgive my interpersonal blunders because theyre pretty sure i am at least somewhat autistic - great, news to me! another friend said that they've identified that i tend to make social decisions based more on how i'm perceived than how it will affect other people which honestly makes me sound kind of sociopathic. jesus

im person who was extremely shut in for the first 24 or so years of their life and had to force myself to step out of my comfort zone and meet people after uni has finished. i've made leaps and bounds in my ability to be a normal person, and i've learned to quell my anxieties by looking at the material truths of my life - my friends do go out of their ways to hang out with me, to talk to me and invite me to things. theyre clearly not just humouring me and must actually like me, and whatever weird behaviour i think i have must be either the result of anxious overthinking, or is obviously not a dealbreaker. im starting to second guess that assessment now, and am kind of wishing people told me off more (now that feels autistic of me)

im ruminating like crazy but that shouldnt be a surprise. im kind of giving myself grace to be stressed for a bit because the potential ramifications of such a big friendship kerfuffle are huge. i feel like its okay to stress about it

mysteries

i was thinking a couple weeks ago about how crazy it must of been to look at the world even as recently as a couple hundred years ago. where do diseases come from? how did mountains and valleys form? what the hell are the bright lights in the sky? we live in a time where just about any question you could have about the world has an answer, as long as you're not looking too small or too big

how much of this did they not even understand that they didn't understand? how much stuff do we not even understand that we don't understand?

every now and then i'll have a bit of a moment where i find myself thinking it's almost unfair that i'll probably never know the answer to what happened before the birth of the universe as we know it, or how big the universe is, or whether it even has limits. if it has limits, what sits outside them? if it doesn't have limits, how does that even work? cosmic scale in general has also been an interesting thing to grapple with - its unlikely that i'll ever go to space, despite the speculative "non fiction" books i read as a kid, and even if i do, the insane distances between everything in the universe means that i definitely won't be visiting another planet. idk, is it reasonable to be disappointed by that?

growing up

i've complained a bunch about how i feel a little out of step with my peers, both the people in my age group and the people i tend to mix with on a daily basis. i did have a big realisation however that i am enjoying teetering on the edge of 30 for a couple of reasons:

1. i'm more self confident than i've ever been. this is partly due to being successful in putting myself out there, and partly coming to terms with a lot of realities about myself as an animated meat bag. talking and seeing more people has made me aware that a lot of things i was self conscious about are actually kind of normal, and ignoring a lot of social media helps with that

2. i haven't given up. i strive to do try new things, to work on projects, to actively better myself. i haven't moved into the suburbs and had 2.15 children and decided that watching the big bang theory is a reasonable pasttime. this is pretty picky and kinda mean to a lot of other people in my age group, and if that life works for you then good for you! but i'm glad that i'm on a path to continue exploring and it makes me hopeful about my future

3. i have a real job that earns real money. this one's pretty straightforward. the beers are on me guys

4. experience is underrated. i was on a call with some friends and someone gave me a prompt for something i thought would be interesting to draw. i pulled out my ipad, did my usual process, shunted the file to my computer and did some final edits in affinity. i more or less did this on autopilot and then was kinda shocked at myself and how much i can just do unconsciously. i can conceive of new recipes and tweak existing ones when theyre not quite working or dont taste quite right. i can do (minor) electrical work, plaster and paint a room, hang new fixtures. i'm acquiring the level of familiarity with the world that made me look up to my parents and their apparent bountiful wealth of knowledge when i was a primary schooler

30 is coming pretty soon. when i was 23 the concept terrified me. now that it's closer, it just feels like another arbitrary threshold

reasons to get up in the morning

there is always a nice alt person at bunnings warehouse who will complement me on my outfit and who i can complement in turn. this is a universal constant for all bunnings warehouses in australia