Vol. 83: Blistered but I’m better and I’m home

This past Wednesday was my thirty-second birthday. I love my birth date: August 21. I'm an August Leo, a summer baby who celebrates all season long. I also ring in my new year right as summer begins to crest into fall, if not in temperature then in culture as we start to consider all the potential that Virgo and back-to-school season offers.

I turned thirty in 2022 in the aftermath of a tumultuous Saturn return with the requisite big life changes: grief, wedding, friendship breakups. While in my late twenties, I witnessed a friend have a crisis over turning thirty but when the day came for me, I welcomed it with open arms. Thirty was fun!

In contrast, last year - turning thirty-one - felt unremarkable. As a Leo, this is extremely triggering! I wanted to do it big but felt anxious asking people to celebrate such a random birthday - I got so in my head that I nearly lost sight of the ways my loved ones did show up & celebrate me.

To celebrate my thirty-second birthday, I went to see two wildly different musicians I first fell in love with as a preteen and teen: Usher and Something Corporate.

I remember watching transfixed as Usher put his U necklace on a girl during a late night concert special in Hannah’s basement when we were barely out of elementary school. Usher’s Yeah!, My Boo, and Confessions Pt. II were among the first songs I bought when I got a green iPod for Christmas in the seventh grade. And as much as I hate the song OMG, I can’t listen to it without being transported to the summer 2010 kitchen at Lurie Terrace, the retirement home where I worked as a server for my first ever job. When I came out, a couple of my straight male friends seriously asked me, “Allison, what about Usher?!”

At the show, he brought out DC’s own Wale for a performance of The Matrimony (I cried) and No Hands (I lost my ever loving mind). The Matrimony was the first song my wife told me that made her think of me (I regularly give her shit about this because, a song about marriage, really?), and we saw Wale perform it sans Usher in January 2016 at the first concert we went to as a couple.

There’s nothing like the way music you loved when you were young carries into your adulthood.

The music I fell in love with in my youth is so random. Why Something Corporate and not any other emo band of the 2000s? In 2005, a girl in my Latin Lunch Club* gave me a mixed CD for our secret amici (Latin for friend, obviously) with Punk Rock Princess on it. I Googled the lyrics in a popular girl’s AIM away message and found Jack’s Mannequin’s The Mixed Tape. I became obsessed with both songs and discovered that the two bands shared a lead singer, thus paving the way for a decades long love of Andrew McMahon.

I spent a lot of time at that age trying either to listen to music that everyone seemed to love, like The Beatles, or trying to find music that no one else had ever heard of. This resulted in a random Christian Rock phase, not so much out of devotion to God as a desire to be unique and different in my liberal hometown. Oftentimes in these pursuits I’d listen to stuff that in hindsight, I don’t think I even liked that much. I say all that to say, the music from that era that I really, truly love hits different.

*This was not an actual club, just a bunch of nerds who ate lunch in our Latin teacher’s classroom

Maybe it sounds trite to some but some of the biggest anxieties I’ve had about aging thus far was around fashion.  I’ve always loved expressing myself through clothes. In my young adulthood I hit a stride of mixing trends with my personal style. Then, in my late twenties, COVID hit right when I was coming off a series of beautiful years where I felt confident, successful, inspired, creative, and challenged - both in how I dressed and in the life I lived.

When the stay-at-home orders first hit, I frequently remarked to Bae that while we were struggling mentally, we were in the ideal phase of life for this unprecedented moment in history: no kids, out of school, freshly engaged, and, so we thought, not missing any major milestones of life in quarantine. But when things returned to “normal” (whatever that means, given that COVID permanently altered the world) and I reemerged to the world, I found myself thrown by the ways I had both changed and stayed the same while the world was simultaneously changing without me.

In 2021, my clothes no longer fit my body but maybe they didn’t fit the world around me, either. I joined TikTok and from a screen, I scrolled past those out living life, getting dressed in 2021 trends. Meanwhile I was timidly dipping my toe into the waters outside my house, barely able to figure out what rules to navigate let alone what to wear. 

While the whole “side part/skinny jeans” millennials/Gen-Z debate discourse online was overwrought, I vividly remember the first time I went into DC for work and felt completely alienated by the outfits I was seeing downtown. New cuts of trousers and jeans. Dad shoes everywhere, bright colors, different patterns. It was like I woke up and found myself in a completely different fashion era, different body, different person and lifestyle than I was in 2019. Where were all the LOFT blouses and Longchamps? (Insert jokes about bad DC fashion if you wish - I won’t be commenting).

My beloved closet became a graveyard of clothes that didn’t fit, that represented a younger me, who traveled constantly for work, was still a part of my college friend group, lived in the city and stayed out late rather than coming home to the suburbs (that I love!) to walk my dog (who I also love!) every day. And wearing outfits - Dresses! Jeans! Blouses! Boots! - I loved instead of constant athleisure. There’s the fatphobia that sprung up with the weight gain, but also I just felt old.

I don’t know if I was scared of getting older. But I was scared of feeling old.

A week before my thirtieth birthday,  my wife took me to Baltimore to see Dashboard Confessional and, surprise, surprise, Andrew McMahon in the Wilderness. At the show, there was a couple dressed like they had stepped straight out of a 2016 J Crew catalog. The man had on the gingham button down - you know the one. The woman had on a floral blouse and statement necklace. And they were trading off carrying a small baby wearing headphones.

I watched them enjoy the music.

I tried to come home and write a newsletter about them back then and am still not quite sure how to convey today what I felt watching them dance with their baby. I guess I was expecting to see people in early 2000s emo kid clothes - the chucks, the black and white checkered vans - whether out of nostalgia or because they still dress how they want. Something about the earnestness of these J. Crew outfits, the way this couple enjoyed a concert with music of their youth while holding close the next generation, made me feel completely at peace with aging.

What’s funny? I don’t even remember the outfit I wore.

Community Care

Speaking of things I did in my twenties that I fell off from (if you have been here since my birthday giveaway era), you can help me celebrate 32 by buying out the Free Minds Book Club wishlist! There are only 10 books on it, so you can make a difference in the life of an incarcerated reader here.

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