Writer's Journal #2
On the Terror of the New Year
I’d like to begin by issuing an apology; I know that it’s now been almost two weeks since I last published a journal entry, but I’m going to attempt to be more consistent regarding my output now that the fervor of the holiday season has fully passed. To that end, I’d like to hold myself to a standard of writing one of these at least once per week - not so frequently to become overwhelming, but not so infrequently as to forestall momentum and dissuade me from writing regularly.
“So this is the new year
And I don’t feel any different”
- Death Cab For Cutie, "The New Year" I’ve recently begun to find the New Year to be a particularly difficult time of year, one pervaded by an atmosphere of tremendous, almost debilitating melancholy.
This has not always been the case; New Year’s Eve once represented the zenith of my year, given that my birthday fell on the year’s last day. As such, it always felt like my birth was the product of some strange sacerdotal ritual, one whose discarding of the emaciated carcass of the old year somehow reveals the possibility of new life. In a sense, this is precisely what our New Year’s celebrations seek to replicate, a secular exorcism of the demons that’ve festered over the past 365 days, the one opportunity afforded for society to collectively signal the possibility of hope in the future.
It is thus ironic that I now feel anything but hopeful upon the dawning of the new year given the excitement it formerly held for me. For the first twelve or so years of my life, my family celebrated New Year’s Eve in the company of friends. These gatherings also served as a de facto birthday celebration for myself and a childhood friend, himself another byproduct of this aforementioned ritual. The two of us were never particularly close as children, but there was always a sense of mutual understanding, amplified by the bacchanal atmosphere we found ourselves immersed in, that these events were of some consequence to our lives. The drop of the ball at midnight, the raucous countdown conducted in feverish anticipation, never once failed to elicit the giddy sensation of being thrust violently forward into a new epoch of our lives. It was exciting to feel one’s life progressing in lockstep with time’s inexorable march, for one’s growth to occur contemporaneously with the passage of each succeeding year.
A decade or so removed from this, I find the very phenomenon that awed me as a child frightening. The sense of anticipation and wonderment I once associated with the intoxicating reverie of this time now produces within me either a profound ambivalence or great loss. I’ve found it difficult to write about this subject because confronting the terror I now associate with the inexorable passage of time fails to result in a coherent justification as to why it even exists in the first place. Shouldn’t the process of growing older continue to prove just as exciting as it did when I was a child?
What I continue to come back to, what seems to result in some semblance of clarity regarding my situation, is the relationship between youth and the concept of “potential”. I am now at a point in my life that straddles the boundary between childhood and adulthood, a period that tends to be marked by a final, brilliant gasp of intellectual and physical development. It is a time wherein the frenzied uncertainty of adolescence is gradually replaced by the gentle undulating rhythms of adult life.
This transition would not prove particularly fraught were it not for the fact that this period also results in the gradual crystallization of one’s self-concept and, to a lesser extent, their abilities. This has typically been associated with the physiological process of aging; synaptic pruning ceases and our brains appear to lose the same capacity for growth that they once possessed. What this entails is the narrowing of possibility and the assumption of concessions that restrict the trajectory of one’s life. Confronted with a set of fixed outcomes, it becomes the prerogative of young adults to pursue those that will prove themselves most beneficial.
That this is an inevitability is not so much what concerns me. It is rather that the arrival of each new year signals the gradual shrinking of this consequential window of time; the echoes of those ribald cheers, those ecstatic cries that once filled me with joy as a child, now sound more like that of time’s cruel tick. Will I become the man I want to be or will I squander this precious period, only to wake in 10 years’ time in undesirable circumstances bemoaning what could’ve been?
This is, of course, a remarkably pessimistic outlook, but I feel increasingly powerless to rectify it. Life is long, but it appears to me that I’ve yet to fully internalize that. Until then, each new year will amount to a eulogy for but another lost moment, a youth unlived and a future increasingly estranged from that which I once thought possible.
Thanks for reading and goodnight.
Song of the Week
Flaming Tunes, “Breast Stroke”
A.R. Kane, “Lollita”
It’s probably bad that I enjoy sharing music as much as I do because this section is threatening to exceed the space I’ve allotted for it. However, I’m feeling compelled to include at least one long-form audio work, so I’ll link that below for your listening pleasure:
Surgeon @ The Orbit (1997)