Surviving 27: A Birthday Essay

A birthday is a good time to reflect on getting older and the meaning of life, right?

“ That was the year, my twenty-eighth, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and ever procrastination, every word, all of it.”
— Joan Didion, “Goodbye To All That”

In the days leading up to today, my 28th birthday, I found myself unable to shake a weird, morbid sort of fixation on the group known as the ‘27 Club’ — Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain, Amy Winehouse, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Brian Jones, Jean-Michel Basquiat and other legendary artists who died at that age.

I had no desire to join them, thankfully. Nor was I necessarily jealous of how much they’d accomplished relative to my own age and résumé…I can’t play guitar like Hendrix, sing like Winehouse or paint like Basquiat, and I never will. To be 27 has rather become for me a symbol of infinite possibility, amplifying the tragedy of their deaths and sending me down the thread of existential pondering you’re now reading.

Being 28 is, of course, not so different from being 27 or 26. But in the main character narrative we all spin for our own lives, it’s the age at which it becomes undeniably more difficult to make out the plot points of your personal hero’s journey. The ship of life has drifted far off the dock of childhood, sailed through the checkpoints of school and career firsts, and entered open ocean. Each degree the rudder moves will change the course by hundreds of miles, as it probably always did, except now I cannot help but notice and be terrified.

One need not look hard to find friends making more permanent decisions: getting married, having children, moving across the country or the globe, or, somehow most fantastical of all, buying a house. We all make gambles in an attempt to increase our personal life piles, however we define them, but at a certain age one wakes up and realizes he or she has at some point been unknowingly ushered up to the high stakes table.

Today, I find myself totally unable to see how the things I’m doing now are in any way setting myself up for the future, a fact I would’ve bragged about only a year or two ago. In many significant ways, I’ve oriented my life over the past handful of years around pursuing my curiosity wherever it led me, to new experiences, new places and new people.

“Then I was young and unafraid
And dreams were made and used and wasted
There was no ransom to be paid
No song unsung, no wine untasted.”
— ‘I Dreamed a Dream,’ Les Misérables

Infinite possibility is still laid out in front of me like a maze, just as it was at 23, or 27, but where I once saw dead ends to explore I now worry about when or if I’ll ever be able to reach the center.

The cruel irony is that most who find that center, that purpose, that meaning, either don’t realize or don’t accept it. Take the ‘27 Club.’ They mostly died of suicide, drug overdose or alcohol poisoning. Several of them would be as jealous of me as I am of them.

I take solace in the fact that no matter how much my perspective changes, I can still only move the ship’s rudder, only gamble one hand, only run down a single maze pathway at a time. Whether my choices matter more now or whether I’m simply participating in the obligatory mass delusion of getting older, I still have those choices in front of me to make. So I’d better make them, and make them good.

Where they’ll lead, I’ll just have to find out.

“Of the empty and useless years of the rest, with the rest me intertwined,
The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life?
Answer.
That you are here—that life exists and identity,
That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.”
— Walt Whitman, “O Me! O Life!”