Inarticulate
Before we begin, a brief preamble: I don’t think I feel like this (“Inarticulate”) anymore. For the first time in a long time, I have a fledgling amount of faith in myself and my future. I trust that I am on the right path and that I’m going to be OK, eventually. I did feel like this (“Inarticulate”) for a long time, though. I’ve spent most of my 20s feeling like this, but especially over the past four years. I kept trying out different ways to write about it, and I think this was the closest I came to properly ~articulating~ the feeling.
Inarticulate
I am less articulate now than I was 4 years ago. I struggle to put my thoughts into words, reducing interesting and complex ideas to the most banal or vague observations imaginable. I feel like I have to rehearse stories before I say them out loud, otherwise there will be long pauses and ineloquent ramblings until I cobble together a unsatisfying approximation of what I was trying to say. I watch my friends watch me with patience as I try to get to my point, lovingly listening because they want me to know that they care about what I have to say, and I’m embarrassed that they have to wait at all. I hate that they have to watch me incoherently stumble towards a point.
Becoming less articulate is directly tied to the pandemic, I know this. I frequently joked throughout quarantine that I was dumber than I used to be, and my very sweet and wonderful best friend would chide me for being mean to myself. I eventually realized that it was making her uncomfortable to hear me say that I was dumb, but I couldn’t stop saying it because I wasn’t trying to be mean to myself. I am a master at insulting myself. I say things to myself that I would never say to anyone else (with a few very rich, white, powerful, mostly male exceptions).
This is not an insult, it’s a fact - I am not as sharp as I used to be. I am not as articulate as I used to be. I forget what I was thinking about more easily and it is harder to pick the thread back up again. There’s a part of me that’s accepted it - I don’t even try to find my train of thought anymore. If I lose it, it’s gone, and if it’s meant to be, it’ll come back around. Which I guess could be considered a healthy approach to life but I think is mostly just nihilism on my part. Nothing really matters, so why bother remembering what I was going to say.
I used to think this feeling would wear off as the pandemic “wore off”, back when I naively assumed every eligible person in America would get vaccinated so we could all go back to our lives and put this whole thing behind us. But the pandemic is not over and it’s hard to know if it ever really will be. And there is no old world to go back to. We’re all unmoored, trying to root back into a reality that doesn’t exist anymore. The dust hasn’t settled, but we’re all supposed to be walking in straight lines as if there is a clear line of sight.
I think, in some ways, the floating is normal now. I saw someone joke online that 2024 is going to be the 2016 of the 2020s (convoluted, but hopefully you follow). I don’t think that’s possible, though. What made 2016 “2016” was not just that Trump was elected, it was that we did not think it was possible for Trump to be elected. His win ripped the fabric of what we thought our lives were, and continued to tear it to shreds for the following four years. It was a seismic paradigm shift that seemed to happen basically over night.
Now, in 2024, with four years of Trump, four years of a pandemic, and an absolutely broken faith in our political and social institutions, I do not know if it’s possible for us to be surprised like that again. Anything feels possible now. The rules are broken.
And yet, people are still planning for the future, with career goals and visions of where they want to be in 5 years, which feels insane to me. How can you be so certain that our lives will be recognizable in 5 years? How do you so firmly believe in the steadiness of the world that you can confidently imagine your future?
It’s not an admonishment, it’s a genuine question - how do you do it, how do you figure it out? I am standing here, an inarticulate 29 year old whose brain already feels slower than it used to, whose ambition has evaporated, no closer now than I was at 22 to figuring out what I really want to do with my life, scared that I will never have the energy to figure it out.
It feels all consuming, being in my late 20s and devoid of direction. And I recognize the drama of it all. I know that this is perhaps the least unique feeling in the world, that this too shall pass. But it hasn’t passed for me, yet. I feel like a teenager, pounding her fists on the wall, demanding to be taken seriously.
I have to get over myself. I am, in the most loving way possible, sick of myself.
