What are you doing with your life?

Building a life you love and the timeline of your twenties

Frances Ha dir. by Noah Baumbach

The summer is one long inhale. Everyone I know is waiting for something to begin. We’re tired of holding our breaths for so long. Endings get caught up in so many beginnings. We sit outside and wait for the clouds to break. The heat comes, like it always does, then leaves again quickly, callously.

This listless waiting leaks out into our conversations. As we fend off wasps in the garden, we dance around the same old questions, exchanging stories of house deposits and new relationships and new countries. Our lives were once a tightly spun web of overlaps and connections. Now, they’re more like the legs of a spider at the centre, stretching out, reaching for something we can’t quite define. Happiness? Security? Freedom?

We are stuck thinking of the next big thing, the next month, the next summer. But on these languorous afternoons we try to freeze time. What are we doing with our lives? Well, this of course. Topping up prosecco glasses. Listening to the new Chappell Roan. Sharing our hopes and dreams and fears. This is living life as much as the house, the relationship, the city.

And yet, the pressure to conform is slowly mounting. The glamour of rebellion fading. You remember it through tattoos and the fur coat hanging in the back of the wardrobe, holding memories and stale cigarette smoke like the aftermath of a secret kiss.

The realisation that we are adults in control of our lives creeps up slowly then engulfs us. But when the fear burns away, the opportunity remains. You have to choose what to do with all this freedom. It should be light, but it feels heavy. So, lots of people choose to shrink it, picking jobs and relationships that offer stability and routine, that reduce the ruthless grind of decision making, the adrenaline frisson of risk.

Only, you can blow it all up and start again if you want. You can change it all in an instant. You can use your wildest passions and your exquisite taste to craft a life like you would craft a poem or a song. Don’t wait for a sign to do it. You are the sign.

I may think this way because my adult life has lacked the anchors I expected from it. Industries and relationships are fragmented and collapsing. The first two companies I worked for went into administration. Most of my relationships have been situationships. Job and romantic security feel so elusive. It’s a generational malaise, but I am not innocent or helpless. There are decisions I made to get here and I must face up to them one way or another.

This summer, I went back to Sheffield again where I am bent backwards, perpetually, into the past. A mist of nostalgia smudged the July sky of my university city when I ran into a cluster of old friends, including my first love. Seven years had passed since I’d last seen some of them. Naturally, they asked what I was doing with my life. We sparred in small talk. The soft justification for leaving or staying. Spending or saving. Staying together or separating. Choosing this city or that other, bigger one.

He is saving for a house. I am running away again, seeking something hazier, more uncertain. If it doesn’t set your soul on fire, don’t do it. But what about the mortgage? And what about the pension? What about the dying alone? We want to be rich, happy, dead.

We’re skating around adulthood and independence and it’s been this way for a decade. Will it ever change? Will we move to sensible towns to settle down or keep chasing our tails through endless cycles of growth and regression? - from my essay How To Move Back To Your Hometown

I spend another summer musing. Picking apart mistakes. Doubled over in indecision. Deluded dreaming again. The year a sloppy, drunk sentence that keeps rambling ahead. This is meticulously planned, Type A chaos. I’m making endless checklists so that I can shove all of the figs on the tree in my mouth until I’m sick.

In Dublin, on my birthday, everything is a sign. A neon yellow sticker plastered to a lamppost reads, ‘There is still time.’ A George Bernard Shaw quote on a museum wall proclaims; “We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing” and this gives me permission to drink innumerable pints of Guinness over the weekend and dance with strangers to live pub music until 1am.

I walk through Trinity College with my best friend and she says, “Every year since uni just gets better.” I’m inclined to agree, but admit that the nostalgia still chokes me up, despite the sad messiness of those years. The tick tock of the clock sounds particularly headache-inducing this time around. But then again, that could be from all the Guinness.

As we follow the footsteps of great Irish writers on a literary pub crawl, I decide to live the poetry that I cannot write and write all that I can. What you are doing with your life is not the job or the city or the relationship or the age. It’s not the book deal or the wedding or the promotion. It’s in the little things you do everyday.

In a year’s time it could all be different. You might be moving again. You might have it all figured out. You might be in love. When people ask what you’re doing with your life, you’ll tell them, but they will never know it all. Some experiences are just for you, in this moment on this hazy August afternoon.

Your life won’t start when summer exhales. It has started already. And it won’t end at 25 or 28 or 30. You will grow out of romanticising a young death. You will be happy.