Tap Tap...Is This Thing On?
Why I'm absolutely unqualified to turn 30.
Helloooo! and welcome to the first ever installment of Bed Crumbs, the newsletter followup to my weekly podcast, Live From Bed, and an alternative commiseration station for all my beloved Bed Heads out there. If you don’t know me, I’m Jade— an introvert who simply cannnnot stop talking. This newsletter will have everything from lists of my favorite things and stuff I think is cool, to ‘dear diary’-style essays about my ever-present, intrusive thoughts. So buckle up, baby and welcome to the inside of my brain.
I can’t believe it’s September again. The air smells like anxiety and back to school. Am I crazy or does 29-going-on-30 suddenly open up the Hoover Dam of nostalgia at this time of year? It’s like my Saturn return came and went (less-than-stellar experience, would not recommend) and suddenly there’s a pain in my chest whenever I think about how I used to successfully delude myself into thinking parties were fun. And it’s not just me– Miley has evidently been feeling it too given her newest single. I know, I know, every boring person on earth has long since stopped posting about how they sewwww can relate to this new phase of the Miley saga, but I think it’s high time I too chimed in.
The song goes something like: I know I used to be crazy, I used to be fun, you say I used to be wild, I say I used to be young. You tell me time done changed me, that’s fine, I’ve had a good run. I know I used to be crazy. That’s ‘cause I used to be young…
Ok, so she’s not going to be winning the Nobel Prize in literature any time soon, but hey, we’re all out here doing our fucking best, and we can (maybe) even forgive her for making everyone born in the early nineties feel like they are suddenly being taken out to pasture. Here’s the thing though: something about her flavor of nostalgia doesn’t hit right for me. I talked about this in the most recent LFB ep with my favorite lesbian Ali Kolbert, but when I was “young,” I wasn’t running around with flowers in my hair and stickers on my nipples, blacking out and having casual sex on the reg (at all). I wasn’t the fun kind of crazy, I was the clinical kind…before it was even chic—s/o to all my manic depressive queens! The fact is that in my ‘glory days’ I rarely stayed up past 9, even when the sleepover was at my house. My friends were getting up to all kinds of teenage mischief while I was knee deep in full-REM. And when I wasn’t sleeping like it was my fucking job, I was doing things like…making slime, or watching Tivo’d episodes of John & Kate Plus 8, or working up the courage to love bomb a stupid boy who say it with me: would never love me back whilst slowly calcifying into a self-conscious bed creature. But I think people like me deserve some representation out there too, even if our high school eras wouldn’t make for a particularly sexy HBO show.
And what kind of person are we now, you ask? Who are these grown ass people who’s high school days more closely resembled Golden Girls than Euphoria? We are the type that sucks just as much at being an adult as we did at being kids. We’re the ones who still have no idea how to match our shoes to our purse let alone our purse to our outfits.
We feel competitive with 12 year olds we see sexy-whisper-singing on TikTok and people who are succeeding in fields we’re not even remotely interested in (are you a botanist whose career has really taken off and appears moderately happy? Congrats, you’re officially a threat to my mental health). We still look away during every surgery scene in Grey’s Anatomy, still don’t realize you have to wet a Mr. Clean magic eraser before scrubbing the whole damn house, and still, on occasion, shit our pants when the coffee hits too hard. We live our lives on 12% battery, use Chat GPT to write our wedding thank-you notes (sue me), and we despise, I repeat, despise brunch (pls don’t invite me) as well as any form of socializing in a dress in broad daylight like an absolute sociopath. We avoid making appointments and reservations like the plague, we avert our eyes if anyone in our family kisses their significant other, and we keep an old, positive COVID test photo saved on our phone for when we need a fun, flirty excuse for canceling on that person…again.
For people like us, my people, my nation, the trepidation toward turning thirty lies less in the idea that by leaving youth behind we’ve lost that sparkle, that unbridled willingness to throw caution to the wind, and more in the fact that we are woefully under-qualified to actually be adults. So to those of you who are, like me, reminded of your arrested development at this time of year and delusionally hoping it will disqualify you from having to get any older, this first installment of Bed Crumbs is dedicated to you. I see you, I love you. Let’s not hang out and say we did.
Love,
Jade