Doc Martens, Tori Amos and the art of un-adulting

I just celebrated a “milestone” birthday. I’m still working out how I feel about it.

On the one hand, I’m still alive. (As my father used to say, getting older isn’t so bad when you consider the alternative.) On the other hand, I’m … well, not as young as I was. At least not numerically.

But that’s where this could get interesting. I think I’m ready to regress. A few weeks ago, I went on my first vacation in 20 years. That isn’t a typo. I really do mean it had been two decades since I’d boarded a plane and gone someplace for the sole purpose of having fun.

It’s not that I haven’t had vacation days. It’s just that for various reasons, I always gave a lot of that time to other people. I used PTO to visit family. Then we used the week we’d reserved for our honeymoon to move home. Then, I stayed nearby in case someone needed my help, which they increasingly did. And then a pandemic made travel unsafe. And then the people and animals in my life got even sicker and then died.

I realize that sounds rather sad and grim. And I guess it is. But I don’t think I’m that unique in this experience. Last week, when someone at work expressed disbelief that it’d been that long since I’d taken a vacation, my response to her was, “Yeah, well, a lot of adulting happened over the last two decades.” A lot of adulting happens to most of us around my age. And the situation is more acute for those cursed with competence.

But anyway, back to regression. I’ve been reconnecting with the parts of myself that knew joy, long before The Great Sadness. I’ve dedicated more time to talking to my childhood friends. I spent that aforementioned vacation with a kindred spirit I’ve known since middle school. We went to Seattle, where we saw Tori Amos, whom I’ve loved since girlhood. The concert was magical, as was every other aspect of our adventure. I wore combat boots the entire trip, and I swear to you, that triggered something in me. I think that’s who I am now — a woman who wears Doc Martens with dresses, even though that hasn’t been a thing for several decades, because they feel good and authentic to me.

Another part of my regression: learning stuff for fun. Over the last couple of decades I’ve had to learn a lot because of my jobs. I’ve learned about stocks and bonds, about SEO and social media strategy, about graphic design and video editing and all of the minutiae involved in UX design. And of course there was the other sort of on-the-job training related to caregiving and everything that has to happen after people die.

But I have spent precious few moments learning things just because. That’s changing this week. In an effort to get me out of the house slightly more often, my dear husband bought me a package of music lessons for Christmas. My former job made scheduling these lessons close to impossible, but now that I’ve got a more flexible schedule, I’m going for it! I thought about a reintroduction to voice, or taking classes to brush up on my piano technique, but I’ve decided to try guitar instead. I think it might be exhilarating to learn something completely new.

For my birthday, my husband surprised me with another package of lessons (he’s one for themes, bless him): dancing lessons. For couples! So we’re starting those this week, too. I took formal dancing lessons up until college, but I never learned ballroom dancing, so this may be fun. And if it isn’t fun, it will probably at least be amusing.

And so that’s that.