A Letter to Autumn, From Autumn

Hello. I just turned 35. Yes, we're still alive.

Dear 21-year-old Autumn, 

I still cry on my birthday.

Maybe if you thought about this, it wouldn’t surprise you, but you’ve never thought about being 35. Not really. You often told people with a dreamy look on your face, half-smile, “I’m going to kill myself someday,” like you were sharing a private joke. And when you tried to envision being happy, you didn’t have the imagination for it. You could imagine a thousand demons, bristling with fangs, slicked-back hair, singed tails, and oiled claws, crawling and slithering and flapping toward you.

Even then, imagine was the wrong word. You thought they were real. They were 3-dimensional cut-outs, shadows from your basal ganglia that siphoned your blood and hooked their reptilian tongues to your central nervous system.

And happiness? Happiness was a vacation poster pasted onto a dirty tunnel wall. It was a place that might have existed once, somewhere, for someone else. Maybe happiness had warm beaches or cold mountains. It didn’t matter. There’s no point in really trying to envision them. You only thought about happiness because sometimes the characters you wrote needed to have a dream you could crush later. 

Something you could never quite articulate. It tasted like battery acid on the tip of your tongue.

I still cry on my birthday for the same reason you do. It’s a period of reflection, a day to remember all the ways we’ve fucked ourselves. We had an entire year to become better people, but we didn’t do it. Not to our satisfaction. We wanted to throw a party like we were the female Great Gatsby, our heartbreak dressed in glitz and gold, fountains flooded with chilled champagne, but we never really learned how to enjoy parties. We’re still broken, and every year we heal ourselves a little bit more just to uncover more damage. Thirty-five is too old to go out like Jesus, too old to have that newborn foal kind of hope, that possibility and excitement when you see an open door ringed with sunshine. Yet, thirty-five is too young to be bitter. Too young to witness the full and complete arc of destruction that you’ve tried to carve out for yourself. I know that one of your greatest fantasies is being old and diseased, laying alone in a bed in a dark room, in a dark house, waiting for death like she’s the only person who will ever give you a genuine smile.

You wanted to be laid to waste by now? Try to calm down. Our liver still works and our skin is still mostly clear.

This newsletter was originally going to be a “35 Lessons that I learned at 35,” but I ended up scrapping that. It felt insipid and numb. Stupid. I didn’t need to fill the Internet with more nonsense like “Truth is the only thing that matters” and “Everyone needs an adventure.” These things are true, but until you’ve experienced them, they’re only platitudes. You could put them on a corkboard in your kitchen and let your eyes glaze over them.

I do have wisdom to give you, younger Autumn, but you probably wouldn’t be able to hear it. Not like that. I’ve lost count of the number of articles I’ve read about “life lessons” that meant nothing to me. Happy and successful people often forget what it was like to be miserable. It’s probably a good thing that we can’t always remember all the ways we’ve failed on the path to getting where we want to be. I’ve recovered from anorexia. (Sorry, I know it’s a major part of your personality.) I can eat a bacon and egg sandwich for breakfast without my throat closing up. I don’t even really have to think about it anymore. But I tend to forget all the times during recovery that I had to crawl across the kitchen floor, eat my food while weeping, grasping at my stomach while it swelled, and I thought I might become so huge I’d collapse through the floor.

So, how can I speak to you in a way that you’d understand?

I don’t want to lie to you. I don’t want to pretend that I’ve figured everything out, that the gap between us was some impossible chasm that I’d climbed with the pure strength of my intellect and will. I wanted to show you that things are still difficult and that I still experience pain. Let’s be honest with ourselves: you still don’t trust any experience that isn’t painful. I know you wouldn’t trust even me, an older version of yourself. You can’t believe that I’m happy. It’s easier for you to believe that I’ve come back in time to torment you with false hope, my regret and bitterness having transformed me into an agent of my own destruction. Yeah. It’s not enough to hurt myself. I’ve got to become an ouroboros of pain in every dimension, reaching to peel away the skin of every iteration of my being. I’ve got to bend backward through time, heels smoking, teeth filed into fangs, and reach out to grab a fistful of my own hair.

That sounds like something you’d write, doesn’t it?

I know that if someone gives you a glass of champagne, your first instinct is to piss in it before you drink it.

I know you want to die. Well, sort of you. You want to die without dying, in the way that cowards do. You want to give up because you think you’ve peeled back the illusion of this world and seen its great mysteries and found that they’re nothing special. A great darkness sits on the lip of every positive feeling. Sure, you’ll say that you don’t understand anything, just like all the great philosophers, but you’re full of yourself. You’re too arrogant to really believe that. You think you’ve got it all figured out. All that’s left to do is to learn how to write it well enough that everyone else can see. 

You think the only thing keeping you from greatness is that you haven’t found the most beautiful words yet. But you only believe in the kind of beauty that sits in a damp hole with gleaming eyes and a predator's tongue, so how could you possibly?

I also know that despite yourself, you can’t give up.

No matter how much you want to be called by the darkness, you can’t help but stir in your sleep so that your face is warmed by the sun that rises.

You’re stupid, and you’re broken, and you’re blind, but you did that to yourself. Your right hand stabbed your left to keep it from reaching for the truth you didn’t dare expose yourself to. You have to press your hand to your heartbeat to remind yourself that you’re still alive because you’ve worked so hard to numb yourself from any sensation that might penetrate all your protective layers and wound you with truth.

But you can’t help yourself. Bruised and crippled, spine hunched like a snake that wants to bite you, you still crawl towards hope.

You won’t live like this forever.

My happiness has reached heights you never thought possible, that you thought didn’t even exist. You abhorred the quiet, still voice of God that came with a moment of peace. Everything alien, even happiness, can be a little terrifying. But you’ll get used to it. You’ll watch a hand of sunlight stretch out across your mind, and those demons that seemed so real will dissolve.

You’ll feel relief once you realize that the stories you told about yourself were just stories. You were a writer trapped in the universe that you created for yourself. It’s happened before, even to the greats. Someone who is clever enough to fool other people with honeyed words usually just ends up fooling themselves. 

But once you realize a story is just a story, all you have to do is create a new one.

You met the tall, dark, and handsome stranger you always dreamed would save you. And he saved you, but not in the way that you thought he would - by inviting you into a darkened, dimly lit mansion in the countryside, his life already arranged for you, so that you could step into a well-stocked kitchen and a chiffon wardrobe but keep all your bad habits. He saved you by teaching you how to save yourself. With his guidance, you pried yourself open and saw the ugliness inside but the beauty, too. Not the fantasy you’d told yourself, but the truth as it was laid out as a mandate of reality.

The truth didn’t hurt as bad as you thought it would. You used that truth as a light to illuminate the path forward.

One day, you’ll write a bad sentence, a bad paragraph, a bad story, and you won’t feel the need to beat yourself up, screaming and hoarse, about what an insufficient human being you are. You’ll just delete it and move on. You once thought you had to motivate yourself with flagellation. That’ll stop when you recognize that error is a part of progress.

At 35 years old, you’re not a fresh-faced ingenue anymore, compensating for your awkwardness with youth, but you’re more beautiful than you’ve ever been.

You’ll recognize that Autumn Christian, as The Writer, is not the sum total of who you are. You cling to writing like it’s the only thing that matters, but the aperture of your experience will start to open up. You’ll start to appreciate moonlight and cold ice water, the feeling of wind on fresh hair, and the smile from someone who loves you. Not just as experiences that you can consume for fodder for literature, things that are only felt so they can be torn apart and analyzed, but as things that deserve appreciation as they are.

You’ll figure out that love is not a disease, not a biological impulse of retrograde chemicals. Love is the motion of everything as it flows toward eternity. It is the appreciation of existence itself. You'll realize you've fallen short of being a loving person. You mistook a strong feeling for love even though your actions weren't loving. That's okay. You can learn.

You thought family was a trap, but one day, you’ll find yourself looking down at a baby girl sleeping in a stroller, her breath fragile but also seemingly infinite, and you’ll never be more certain that you made the right choice to have her.

None of this happened by accident. There was luck, of course. You’ve had plenty of luck. But you suffered for every scrap of progress that came to you. You’ll cry out in the darkness for someone to help you over and over again because you keep forgetting that the only one who can truly help you is yourself. You’ll never lose that impulse. I still want to be rescued in the way that a puppy is rescued from drowning, shivering in the arms of someone kind and warm. 

It hurts sometimes to look at pictures of you. Your haunted eyes beg for a savior.

It won’t always seem like you’re making progress. Some days, you’ll want to turn back to the comfort of darkness and small dreams. You’ll want to abandon your family and write sad little stories in a closet while swigging warm white wine and watching your hands get old on the keyboard underneath a dim light bulb. You’ll have a revelation and then forget it. You’re good at that. Forgetting. You’re my favorite amnesiac. You’re so adept, so skilled, in all the ways you can hide from yourself. 

I still cry on my birthday because I know how to feel regret in a way that’s impossible for a twenty-year-old. I grieve everything I’ve lost and will never get back because that time has slipped away before. I can see that the things I thought were foundational to my personality, the things that protected me, were just rot and decay. I tried to protect my heart with my rage, and all it’s done has slowly killed me. Sometimes, I still wake up in the middle of the night with my hands gripping my throat. A part of me aches to destroy everything I worked so hard to build.

But I also have people who love me and remember me. A family that sends me flowers. A husband who makes me steak (Yeah, we eat red meat now. I know you’re surprised.) and drinks cocktails with me while we never run out of conversation, a two-year-old who is bright and healthy, three dogs, a nice place to live, a book project to work on, new dreams, surprising dreams, that unfold with extradimensional, glittering angles, revelations that seem to border on the supernatural. 

You can’t feel this yet. You don’t even want this yet. I understand. I promise you that God isn’t as cruel as you imagined. Not every good feeling is a demon in disguise, a clever machination designed to wring more pain from you.

Sometimes, despite yourself, often in direct opposition to yourself, you still manage to move forward. One day, you’ll look back and see how far you’ve come. You’ll laugh at yourself like I’m laughing at you now. You’re a jaded little girl, Bukowski's attitude without Bukowski’s experience, who had no idea how much there was still to discover. Each mystery hides another mystery inside of it. Each living thing, no matter how broken, holds the memory to recreate a thousand copies of itself. Every day the sun quenches itself in the light of the moon. The moon burns away to reveal another sun and, with it, a new and glittering aspect of life.

You wake up and think, this is it?

I wake up and think this is it.