I turned 28 this past week, while my partner and I were exploring Glacier National Park. Here are a few physical signs that I have aged: my hair is thinning up top. My waistline is expanding. I'm starting to grow hair around my ears (I hate this, and I never thought I would shave/pluck in that area, but alas). Obviously, I am not old, and there is much more that I love about my body than what is aging, but I have to face the facts that I am definitively in my late twenties.
It is a strange to feel like I have both wasted my twenties and accomplished a significant amount of living in that time. I have published several essays. I have completed two rough drafts of novels, I am halfway through a second draft of one. I have a complete memoir manuscript. I have two degrees, and by thirty, I'll have earned my third degree. I served an LDS mission. I came to terms with my sexuality, dated, and married. I've purchased a home and a car. I have health insurance. I've made great friends, and I've lost great friends. I've been to Europe, and traveled through every western state.
And still, there's a sense of grief that has come with turning 28. It's not that I'm sad to see my twenties go. It's more about the fact that I feel like I missed out on a lot of experiences in my twenties because self-discovery tends to eat up a healthy amount of time when you're battling self-loathing and mental illness.
I watched Love, Victor a week before my 28th birthday, and one of the big questions I have as a result of that show is who would I be if I had allowed myself to accept my sexuality when I recognized it. I wonder what every relationship in my life would look like if it didn't have some sort of foundation in dishonesty (lying about my sexuality) and self-loathing (hating myself for not being able to change my sexuality). I think I'm becoming a much more honest person, although there are still times I try to hide the truth to spare people's feelings (I haven't talked to most of the religious people in my life about the damage that their beliefs can do to queer individuals, and when they try to skate past that damage in conversations, I regularly let them). I still struggle with self-loathing. I don't hate myself as much, and mixed with self-loathing is self-love. I've heard that's pretty common for all of us, but I wonder what I would love and hate about myself if I had just been okay with my sexuality from the time I recognized it.
I know that there's no timeline for learning self-love (although, I think we all want to learn it before we die), and there's no timeline for healing from trauma, but I feel like most people have a lot more of those fundamental lessons learned by the time they've reached their late-twenties. They have learned how to be honest. They have learned how to establish boundaries. They have learned how to accept their sexuality. I'm still taking baby steps on each of those things, and I wish that I could feel like I were further along that path.
There's an academic concept called "queer time," which is the idea that queer people learn and emotionally develop at a different rate than heterosexual, cisgender people. Where heterosexual people and cisgender people are able to have honest experiences in their teens and early twenties in regards to relationships and sexuality, a lot of queer individuals miss out on those honest experiences, and therefore miss out on the lessons that heterosexual and cisgender people experience. We have to learn those lessons later, when we decide that we can be honest and open. I'm starting to grapple with queer time as I look forward to my thirties. Where most of my high school friends are settling into careers and having children, I'm still figuring out a lot of the things that they seem to have figured out.
I don't know who I would be if I had been able to be honest in my late teens and early twenties. I know he would be a different person, and I grieve that, even as I'm learning every day to accept the reality of life as it is. I know what I need to work on in the coming years to learn the skills that I feel like I missed in my teens and early twenties.