Still Figuring It Out at 40
Adulthood did not arrive as a solution. It arrived as a longer hallway.
Trey Robinson
Forty was supposed to look like arrival. Instead it looked like a more honest inventory.
I was still living inside systems that never updated their story of me. I was still doing the second shift. I was still trying to tell the truth without turning it into a plea.
People like a narrative in which insight ends the trouble. Insight did not end the trouble. It made the trouble visible enough to write.
Figuring it out, at this age, means refusing the fantasy that understanding is the same thing as being understood.