Lately, I Feel Everything

On Willow Smith's "The 1st" and realizing you're getting older

As a person in their mid-twenties, every day I fluctuate between feeling closer to “young” or “old.” It’s a time in life where my self-perception inaccurately falls at either end of the spectrum, balancing both the realizations that I just got here, and have kind of been around for a while now too.

Constantly helpless in the face of these facts, I often resort to looking backwards. The passage of time holds all the answers, and the questions: how have I never seen that music video that came out 5 years before I was born? When was that movie I love even released? Why are we approaching a decade since my high school graduation? Why am I allowed to be this age while also having no idea what the fuck is going on? When do I figure it all out? Am I the only one who still hasn’t?

These questions may not be typical of all people in their twenties. The majority of us are hopefully too busy partying and making irresponsible decisions and obsessing over our bodies to care about the passing of time.

But some of us are highly anxious individuals. Some of us, like people of all ages, feel like each second is ushering us closer to a destination that we’re ill-prepared for. A destination that may no longer be available to us by the time we get there. Whether it’s prosperity, or peace, or love, or some other kind of fulfillment—there’s always something hanging in the balance of your 20s. Something you seek subconsciously, desperately, and yet you seek nothing more than freedom from it altogether. Freedom from the pressure to ‘become.’ Freedom from the uncertainty of not knowing what to become, or how, or when.

This is the kind of illogical babbling of baby-adults that makes older people laugh or eyeroll, which I personally always receive as a welcome reminder that I am a deeply unserious and unreliable narrator. The thoughts in my head are the thoughts of someone who is still growing, who has learned a lot but still has more to experience than she can even fathom. I’ve reminded myself of that throughout my life.

But sometimes, it seems the meaning of youth is impatiently waiting for the day when I get to regard myself as an authority. And being in your 20s feels like repeatedly learning the same lesson, where every time you get to feeling like you’re in control, you’re reminded that you’re kind of an idiot.

Lately, I’ve spent less time searching for revelations in the years that pass, and more time meditating on the fact that the years are passing. It happens, shockingly enough. Even when you don’t realize it. Even when the little inexperienced voice in your head cannot articulate to you how you’ve been growing or what you’ve been learning, it’s been happening. Whether you or anyone can see it, the things you experience over time change your behavior and ultimately who you are as a person.

Bread found in bakery, I know. But I’ve learned that reminding myself of the basics is necessary for my wellbeing.

Recently I was thinking about Willow Smith’s 2017 LP “The 1st,” which was released on her 17th birthday. Willow Smith and I were born two months apart, and growing up she always felt like a kindred spirit of mine living in a parallel universe. We liked the same musicians, had the same spiritual interests & curiosities, and for a time she was my only frame-of-reference for a ‘weird’ black girl (which made her exactly the opposite of weird to me). Like if my parents were rich and raised me in Calabasas or something, she’s a pretty accurate representation of how I would’ve ended up. (Despite the class differences, I’ve always been grateful for my particular version of events; unrelated to Willow, the thought of being out-of-touch with reality has always seemed scarier than living in the hood.)

So when “The 1st” came out as the second Willow project to immediately get stuck in my constant rotation, I was just weeks shy of joining her in becoming a seventeen-year-old girl. I listened to the songs for insights, wondering what she was learning about girlhood from her vantage point. I was pleased to hear lyrics about pining over boys who like Quentin Tarantino along with yearning to see the world through divine eyes, a range that perfectly captures my teenage psyche.

Willow’s debut, “ARDIPITHECUS,” felt like home too. When that album came out, we were two fifteen-year-old girls ruminating over the ills of society, the history of the planet, the magic in the rocks and the writing in the stars. I don’t think teenage me would have told you that Willow Smith was her favorite artist, but in some ways I had never felt a more potent belonging than in the deep, rumbling bass chords of “RANDOMSONG.” I had never in my life heard lyrics like “I’ll run my hands through your hair/You wanna run your fingers through mine/But my dreads too thick and that’s alright.”

At that time, ‘dreads’ weren’t really positively acknowledged in any music I’d heard besides reggae. I had them long before Willow did, so by my teenage years I was already confidently in love with my hair, but it was never lost on me that the roughness and thickness of it was not preferred by society. It had occurred to me before that every time I’d seen a character in a show or movie running their fingers through someone’s hair, it was soft and never more than slightly curly. So I giggled at that lyric when I first heard it back then—what a silly way to feel seen.

I also remember listening to Willow’s debut while seated in my Grandmother’s hospital room for visits. She had a stroke in 2017 that impacted her ability to speak, so after school every day I’d go to the hospital with my mom or other family members to monitor her there. The visits were long and relatively quiet, so I’d often keep music playing in one earbud while I wrote journal entries or short stories in my notebook.

I think about those hospital rooms every time I hear a song from “ARDIPITHECUS.” I think about listening to Willow question the meanings of life and humanity while I wondered how to communicate with my Grandmother’s spirit while she was still alive. Or where she, all of us, end up once our time is complete.

Is time ever complete?

One of many questions that I have yet to answer for my teenage self. She was stubbornly curious, that one, and she searched for clues in ancient texts and Willow Smith albums and countless rewatches of Interstellar. She soothed herself with the understanding that each day she was getting older, getting closer to being a person who knows something. Closer to being a person who could put her searching spirit to rest with some kind of Big Reveal.

The bad news, younger me—if you’re reading this from the past as Christopher Nolan would suggest that you could—is that I do not have the answers for you. Not for the big questions, the existential things you’re most excited to discover.

More bad news: obliviousness still makes you frustrated and restless, and I’m not sure when that will change.

The good news, finally: time passes.

Yes, you knew that. That’s not news to you. But it’s news to me every single day, and lately increasingly so. This year, it was news to me that “ARTHIPIDECUS” is now a ten-year-old album. It was news to me that next year marks a decade since 2016 (arguably my generation’s most nostalgia-filled year). It was news to me when I looked at myself and realized that I have become a woman, or something like it, in the time since my Grandmother left this earth.

In October, I looked at the date and saw I was at the five-year mark since one of the most traumatic experiences of my life. I was 20 when it happened, wondering how I could possibly make it through the rest of the decade with this pain and debating whether I was even interested in trying. I couldn’t see ahead back then. As usual, I analyzed every scenario and assessed every possibility, and ultimately deduced that I was doomed and irreversibly damaged. If you asked me, I simply could not heal.

NEWSFLASH: YOU CAN’T SEE AHEAD.

Time is like the steep hills that Leonardo DiCaprio’s character drove through in One Battle After Another in search of his daughter; it won’t bend to your will to know the ending. You have to ride and ride, and you get there when you get there. And “getting there” never ends.

All that ever exists is the present moment. I’m here now, the only ‘here’ we have, and I can tell 20-year-old me that she did heal. (From that thing—there is new trauma to heal from kiddo. And old shit you never thought about that I have to deal with now.) And I have no instruction manual to offer her for how she did it, except a tip: time does it. You just cooperate.

I don’t feel ‘older and wiser’ now, just older. I’ve learned and read and gained knowledge, but younger me was doing that even more obsessively. I don’t feel like I know more than her (and she would challenge me anyway if I did), but I’ve seen more than her. I still remember the day in elementary school science class when she learned that the age of a tree is estimated by the number of rings around its bark. I’m not sure why that fact was so enchanting to her or why we never forgot it, but lately as time passes I feel like I’m gaining new rings.

I may be lost and confused and incomplete. But there are more and more rings around the bark. I know that because when I realized it had been five years since October 2020, I thought about what I would say to myself back then. I heard it precisely in my mind, all of it, and it drove me to a fit of tears.

I knew what to say. If it happened to a younger girl in my presence, I would know what to say to her. And if it happened to me now, I’d handle it differently than I did then.

That’s growth. I’m not sure how to offer instructions for how to get from not knowing to knowing, other than to release the desire to know. Adulthood is teaching me to let time pass. That time will pass whether you ‘let’ it or not. Each ring around the bark may not bring a clear answer to a question, and it will likely add ten new questions every time, but the rings matter. And it takes a good few rings to understand why.

Another album that feels quintessential to my teenage girlhood, and helped me process the emotions of my Grandmother’s death, is of course SZA’s “CTRL.” I remember wondering why “20 Something” sounded so similar to what being a teenager felt like, and hoping the song was an inaccurate depiction. After going through my first-ever breakup, her lyrics on “Normal Girl” taught me a lesson about time:

“This time next year, I’ll be livin’ so good/Won’t remember your name, I swear.”

Just like SZA predicted, a year after that, the pain of my first boyfriend leaving me disappeared. He’d grown bored of the girl he was dating, which was not as soothing to me as the realization that I simply didn’t care anymore. I started to trust time. If a year can do that, a year can do anything.

The trust was broken once I realized that a year won’t always make something go away. A year won’t always completely change something around. But I know now that a year is always a new ring, and despite the depth of your pain, the rings will continue to accumulate until you have enough to heal. And they will continue even after that if you hold on for the ride, which I am grateful to younger me for doing even when she thought she couldn’t.

I am not an expert on how to exist like I’d once hoped to become, but I trust the rings as evidence of my credibility. And when I think back to the song that was my undisputed favorite on “The 1st,” I trust the voice of my younger self with fewer rings, too:

“There has to be a reason I’m alive/

I know there’ll be a reason that I die/

And as I walk these roads throughout my life/

I find the subtle reasons.”