What I Think and Feel at 27
In Fall of ’21, Fitzgerald wrote an essay for Brentano’s Book Chat titled “What I Think And Feel At 25.” 19 years later, he would die at the ripe, old age of 44 from a heart attack, “the poor son-of-a-bitch.” His essay starts with two encounters in which he openly expresses vulnerability and a desire to discuss its effects on life, but the uninterested parties, a few years his senior, leave after having given their own little speeches about death, divorce, and health. In typical writer fashion, Fitzgerald decides to create an essay of morbid realities he’s learned as “a middle-aged man” after being ignored by his peers; our words will always be written, even if we don’t get to say them.
The average life expectancy of a human body in its natural, intended state is far lower than its unnatural, cultural state. Even though he died at a young age, Fitzgerald wrote about the type of person he wanted to be when he was sixty despite a life expectancy of early 50s as was normal for the time period. He writes as a middle-aged man, while I, two years their senior, craft an essay of morbid realities I’ve learned as someone who has their whole life ahead of them and a lifetime of travels and experiences behind them. To my dismay, it starts much the same, “the first five years [of my life] seemed to go all right- but the last twenty! They have been a matter of violently contrasting extremes.”
To be callow is to be inexperienced and immature. To be morbid is to be interested in “unhealthy” and disturbing subjects like death and disease. In his essay, Fitzgerald makes a point to separate that he writes no longer of the frivolities of callowness, but rather the maturity of the morbidities he knows. With “my whole life ahead of me,” I sit and write immaturely of the morbidities I know.
I feel I am intrinsically linked with morbidities. The intersections of my identity, disabled, Queer immigrant, invoke images of sorrow, oppression to Hollywood execs, but to me, the story I have created is one I am proud of. There are other elements of my identity which add more intersections, writer, photographer, assault survivor, and adoptee. Much like the history of Queer people and immigrants, it is a complex story of overcoming repeated obstacles, it is a story of resilience, survival, and it is a story that I hope will inspire someone, anyone.
My inexplicable interests with 9/11 and the Holocaust started at a young age. I often watched movies and documentaries on these topics for reasons still unknown to me. I watch Little Miss Sunshine and Bridge to Terabithia when I need to cry, because these movies guarantee a cathartic release of stress through tears. I travel to New York and other cities to see theatre and opera and artists that bring me to tears for the same reason, because sometimes, my bedroom and surroundings are too familiar and scary, and I need to escape.
“Skipping that long list of mistakes which passes for my boyhood,” I road-tripped to the grand canyon where I contemplated life, my history, and my identity and all their complications, coming back after a week feeling refreshed and ready to tackle things within my control before they slipped.
And then they slipped, because I asked for something better, knowing I deserved something better. Some didn’t believe me and others sympathized, but there was no resolution. Through my experiences, I learned when to speak up, and when to keep quiet, but because I spoke up, better things fell further away. “I’d be perfectly doing just what I wanted to do,” when I shared my stories and experience “when somebody would begin shaking his head and saying “…you mustn’t go on doing that. It’s- it’s morbid”” when a warning of the morbid results for coming forward would have been more beneficial. Regardless, I decided to commit to speaking up against abuse in the Baltimore theatre community and against abuses and ignorance displayed from coworkers. The morbid results have been difficulty finding employment in my career field and passion and difficulty gaining the trust of a guilty community who expects my feelings to be hurt when I experience repeated instances of previous traumas.
I am well aware my experiences and how I presented them have directly affected me and are self created morbidities. I am a person with a specific story that is still being told, and as long as I can speak and write, it’ll be told in all its joy and sorrow. Much like Fitzgerald, I often find myself displeased and easily bored with meeting people who always talk about their experience despite not having any. As Holden Caulfield lovingly called them, “phonies.”
“Having got in wrong with many of the readers of this article, I will now proceed to close. If you don’t agree with me on any minor points you have a right to say: “Gosh! He certainly is callow!” And turn to something else. Personally, I do not consider that I am callow, because I do not see how anybody of my age could be callow. For instance, I was reading an article in this magazine a few months ago by a fellow named Ring Lardner that says he is thirty-five, and it seemed to me how young and happy and carefree he was in comparison with me…The older I grow the more I get so I don’t know anything.”
I am trapped in a tiny corner of a large world surrounded by numerous others living an individual history as complex as my own. There’s a lot encapsulated in my 27 years, but I have so much more to learn. If I had completed this at twenty five, “it might have been worth reading,” and I might have gotten into Columbia.
