The Age of Ambiguity
By Natalie McCarty
There is a particular age of ambiguity that one inhabits in late adolescence and early adulthood. Often found within the solace of a first love and a first sip of beer, there are thoughts elicited and provoked during this time of being that are the closest to the skin of the earth possible.
There is a freedom in feeling because you're shedding the skin of the life you've coursed through and floating freely, not yet burdened by the armor you collect to protect yourself later in life against the things you experience only at this age.
Credit: Charlotte Seigel
I reflect on the shit I was writing when I was 17 or 18, and I think it was actually the peak of my introspection. I will never again come close to it because I no longer have the luxury of accessing my feelings on such a scale.
At 18, I was the closest I had ever been to simply living my life. I wrote because there was nowhere else for the feeling to go. I sang because there was nothing else that could eviscerate my pain from my body.
Now, before a thought even reaches the page, some part of me is already imagining how it will be read. Now there is this awareness of being seen and perceived. I am consciously aware of the millions of eyes that will fall upon even this piece that I write. There is no comfort and serenity of a little loft in Williamsburg anymore, with only the nearby rooftops to hear me wail and ramble of my troubles and hopes and strifes.
I live with this remorse and regret that I should've made more art before I had people to please with what I share.
The commodification of your deepest thoughts for the public to consume destroys the art of conception. Feelings are no longer allowed to ripen in silence. They are plucked too early, still green, as you begin harvesting your own interior before you've had the chance to inhabit it. In trying to preserve every feeling, you unknowingly interrupt the life it might have lived inside you.
The moment you know your feelings can be consumed by others, they begin to change shape. Before an emotion has the chance to fully form, some part of you is already preparing it for someone else's gaze (as I’m doing in editing now). There is a loss in that, that not every thought was meant to become a statement.
With that, you become less emboldened in your storytelling. Things become less possible the more you learn to keep your emotions to yourself, but that restraint becomes crucial for survival. The same walls that protect you are the ones that keep you from reaching beyond yourself.
The love I felt then pales in comparison to what I share now, but there was something raw and tattered and pathetic and also brave about it then. Those feelings of first rejection and pain, but also that first sense of being seen, linger with you always.
How beautiful is it to bare yourself naked on the level of your soul to someone and know that they wholeheartedly see you for you and then some? They see the you you were and the person you dream of becoming and wish to be. If you're lucky, they'll even see which dreams you conquer and which ones tend to keep you at bay.
There is only one time in life when you live as your truest self in all expression before life teaches you to cauterize every wound instead of let it bleed.
Before adulthood hardens you, there is a brief moment when every feeling reaches you completely. Every joy, every humiliation, every heartbreak, every love. Everything at this time manages to leave a deep and permanent scar.
It is a beautiful thing to fully swim in your feelings before you condition yourself and them in order to carry on with life.
Perhaps this feeling has existed long before I had the language for it. The Japanese call it mono no aware, the gentle sadness that comes with recognizing the impermanence of all things. It is the ache of watching a flower reach its fullest bloom while knowing it has already begun to disappear. Maybe that is why those years feel so sacred in retrospect: their beauty was inseparable from their fragility. I could only experience them so deeply because, somewhere within me, I already understood they would not last.
The Portuguese call this feeling saudade, a longing for something absent, a love that remains even after the moment itself has passed. It is not simply missing something but carrying the ghost of something that once made you whole. There is a particular grief in longing for a version of yourself who still exists only in memory.
Or, as the Germans would call it, Sehnsucht, the restless yearning for a life that exists somewhere between what was and what could be. The ache for a self you once were and the self you still dream of becoming.
Maybe that is what I am mourning at my grown age: the person I was when I had not yet learned to protect myself from feeling everything. The person who could stand completely open to the world and let it leave a mark.
While I'd certainly never want to be 18 again, I treasure and carry that young woman in all her contradictions and beauty and boldness and strife. I think my life was only made possible by the young girl desperate to dream and fervent in her feelings. She absorbed life like a sponge and felt everything there was to feel. She had not yet learned that feeling so deeply comes at a cost.
Every life I've built since has grown from the soil she turned over with her bare hands.
What a beauty and a gift it was to have felt this at all.
