the most alive i've ever been

on aging, queer time, and feeling like a teen girl again

I love the new Olivia Rodrigo single. I’ve been a fan since SOUR, which I listened to on a post-breakup, cross-country road trip: windows down, scream-singing and wheel-drumming, feeling 17 again—even though I turned exactly twice that age this April. Rodrigo is not a teenager either, but she writes from that recent place, perfectly capturing the raw surge of emotion that is teenage girlhood, when nothing has happened yet. Which means anything could.

When I get asked that small talk question what age do you feel you are at your core, I always say 17. Despite her many foibles and misapprehensions, I adore my teenage self. Yes, she was irritable, insecure, histrionic, and terribly misdirected. Yes, her senior yearbook quote included an unintentional reference to a sex act. BUT! She was also deeply attentive to the world around and inside of her. She was ridiculous, reverent, rapturous.

At 17, I had a sense of a life just about to unfold. Ahead lay a treasure trove of knowledge and experiences. I craved transformation, and I was guaranteed it. After all, to be a teenager is to know things definitely won’t stay the same.

I was incandescent with possibility.

That feeling didn’t last long.

Right after college, once I’d made all the big decisions (marriage, career, city, house), I felt the light drain rapidly out of me. It was as if I’d reached the end of the line. Life was now a series of milestones, mostly passed. There was no longer a sense of expansion but rather an increasing claustrophobia, like the walls were closing in on me. I knew what my life was going to look like for the next 60 years. There was nothing left to discover. Anything I might learn now would only complicate things.

But, of course, the great blessing of life is that nothing stays the same. Divorce and deconstruction flicked a domino that toppled the structure I’d always assumed my life would take. I didn’t know what was coming next, but I knew it would not look anything like I thought.

Ejected from the forward march of my life, time slowed, twisted, rewound. Suddenly I was a teenager again, alone in my glowing pink bedroom, getting to decide what I wanted my life to look like.

I experienced another kind of adolescence when I came out as bisexual at age 29 and started dating women for the first time. Like many late bloomers, I felt pubescent in my awkwardness. I remember staring at my closet, wondering what one wears on a first date with a woman (I chose a turtleneck for some reason), who books the reservation, who makes the first move. It seemed like such basic stuff to only be figuring out now.

But I also felt like a teenager again in the best ways—that same fizzy sense of possibility, openness to the world, and hunger for new experiences. Her hand on my knee, our kiss in the parking lot, the schoolgirl giddiness of an entirely new set of firsts. Eventually, I embraced my inexperience and all the excitement that came along with it. You only get to be a beginner at something once. How rare and lovely, at age 30, to still be discovering something new and surprising about yourself.

Free from the dominant scripts, I began to imagine new ways of structuring my life. The path ahead was no longer linear, but radiating ever-outward. There’s a name for this: queer time. Coined by Jack Halberstam, queer time is the opposite of the traditional linear lifespan of marriage, production, and reproduction. Those milestones have not historically been available to LGBTQ+ folks, they had to develop alternative ideas about how their lives would unfold.

Just as teenage music is not confined to one’s age, queer time is not confined to one’s sexuality. bell hooks defined it like this: “‘Queer’ not as being about who you’re having sex with (that can be a dimension of it); but ‘queer’ as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and that has to invent and create.” To step into queer time requires only a willingness to question existing structures and expand beyond them.

I’ve had many experiences of queer time in the past few years. First, as I mourned what felt like “lost time”—decades during which I didn’t have this knowledge about myself. Then, as I navigated a giddy and confusing second puberty when I started dating women. Now, near daily, as I direct myself away from what is my five-year plan and toward how do I want to feel in the present moment? and when I move toward that feeling of aliveness.

There’s an undeniable freedom to this way of inhabiting time. I feel it especially when it comes to aging. At 34, I’ve never been older, but I’ve also never felt younger than I do right now. There’s a moment in Trying by Chloe Caldwell when she worries about being 37 and starting her life over, at the same time she’s stepping into her queer identity. A friend texts her about the incredible anti-aging effects of queerness: “You gain 10 years, easy, when you become gay. Dorian Gray effect guaranteed.”

I hear from other women, both friends and strangers online, about a fear of time progressing. Sometimes it’s a fear of being “behind” as measured against the milestones we’ve been taught to strive toward since girlhood: marriage, a family, a house. Often, it’s the pressures of aging and beauty, which turns time against us and makes it an enemy intent on our destruction. In this conception of time, each year chips away more of one’s inherent value.

But you can only be behind if the path of your life is linear, a long slow slog in one direction. If, however, you view aging not as a progression forward but an expanding outward—well, it’s harder to conceptualize what “behind” would even be.

My favorite Substack publication is Oldster Magazine, which interviews from people at every stage of life about their relationship with aging. (As much as I love and respect young women, I’m only accepting life advice from those over age 50 at this time.) There is so much wisdom, playfulness, humor and FUN in these interviews which debunk the many myths of aging. One that has always stuck with me, from 75-year old Maryjane Fahey:

“My life is widening as I age. It is not narrowing as I had been told it would.”

I’m starting to think the whole point is not arriving or even actualizing, but widening. It’s the feeling I had as a teenager, and the one I’m experiencing again now. It recalls this line from Rilke, which reminds us it’s never too late to be born again: “Then I know that there is room in me / For a second huge and timeless life.”

Or, to quote another poet: to be, at every age and in every moment, “the most alive I’ve ever been.”

Love,

Lane 💋

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Thanks so much for reading! If you enjoyed this post, giving it a little like translates as a forehead kiss. Leave a comment or send me a message to let me know what you thought of it. And as a token of my gratitude: here’s a playlist of the music I was actually listening to as a teenager.

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