What Changed about Me in the 2010s

The tweet that prompted the writing challenge. December 20, 2019. The World Wide Web.

That so many people on social media could post their exact whereabouts and activities on New Year’s Eve 2009 in comparison to their whereabouts on the same date in 2019 astounded me.

I can’t remember a single thing about New Year’s Eve 2009.

I can delineate the broad strokes of my life at the time, but the specifics of any given month or year? I can’t. At least, not without a lot of reflection and investigation. And I see no need for that.

Around the time of my amazement at others’ memories about the exact details of a decade earlier, I saw a tweet from William Pora about how the twentyteens (if that’s how we’re calling them) had changed him. A brief tweet exchange spurred a writing challenge, a reflection challenge (for me, anyway), and this post. (For Will’s response to this writing challenge, read his post on his site.)

If I approached Will’s prompt from a superficial level, I’d have had a much easier time drafting this post than I did have.

I crashed into the twentyteens with a big heartbreak relatively early in the first year of the decade and then spent the majority of the subsequent years mending my heart, solidifying myself as a person in the world (independent of any significant other), attempting to date, and repeatedly realizing that singlehood is pretty darn good (as everyone who read this blog from its beginning will remember).

I ended the twentyteens by finding my person—when I’d nearly given up, just as all the tropes said that I would—marrying him in France, moving with him to Switzerland, and then spending most of the final year of the decade adjusting to an entirely new life and world order.

What a decade.

And so: How did these outside changes affect the inside me?

My Physical Sense of Mortality

As they did for Will, the twentyteens developed my sense of mortality.

Externally, I’d long since come to terms with my hair’s complete lack of body and the fact that I couldn’t wish (or diet) myself into a Twiggy-esque body type. I’ve never had these things and I knew at the start of the decade that I would never have them.

However, during the twentyteens, I lost aspects of my appearance that I once did have. Today, I look in the mirror and see that some of my former features have dissipated. I’ll never have a smooth forehead again. My neck will probably only get more crepe-like in texture and appearance.

When I look in in the mirror or at photographs, I surprise myself.

Some days, this gets to me. Other days, I realize that coming to terms with my age’s inevitable and irreversible affect on my outward appearance will allow me to care less about the small details of my looks and more about my overall health and wellness.

However, as to my overall health and wellness, I’ve found that my body doesn’t do what it used to do or even entirely what I want it to do anymore. I can’t achieve what I might want to achieve or at the levels I might have once achieved it when it comes to athletic activity, for example. As for other basic physical abilities and bodily functions that I once had or that I once never needed to consider: Many I no longer have and many I now need to consider.

These realizations come at me a little harder, and I find them harder to accept.

Yet these are—thankfully—the incremental and gradual changes that acquaint me with my own limited life span. I should be glad that I can experience them, and I should realize that my ability to experience them belies my ego’s offense at their occurrence.

Because the twentyteens also brought the advent of friends in my peer group fighting cancer and other serious illnesses—and not all of them made it through. When your peers begin to falter and die—and not in that “tragic youth” kind of way—you realize most markedly where you stand on the world’s timeline for you on this planet.

New Perspective and Mourning Earlier Plans

Connected to this sense of mortality is a sense of grounding and, at times, depressing perspective. In realizing that I’ve reached the midpoint of my years on this earth—if I am fortunate—I now look at my former goals and plans and reassess.

In the twentyteens, I grew up.

A lot of my illusions about how my professional and personal lives would transpire or how they should transpire came to dead ends. In some ways, it saddens me to let go of my illusions. Doing so has required an ongoing mourning process.

In other ways, letting go of former notions pushes me to think more clearly about how I’d like my life to move forward, now that the illusions have evaporated. I can see that not having accomplished or experienced some of what I had expected to accomplish or experience isn’t all that bad. Also, what I have in my life is pretty darn good—and it may be better than it would have been if I’d achieved and undergone everything I’d planned.

The more experiences we have—the more years we pass on this earth—the more that the most reflective and aware among us can gain perspective and crystallize what matters most to ourselves.

I hope I can count myself in this group.

Moving from Accumulation to Increased Focus

In the vein of crystalizing and refining and focusing on what matters and has real importance, I look back on the twentyteens and see that I’ve moved from a fairly stuff-accumulating and life-complicating headspace to a space wherein I continually work to reduce my load to only that which I need and love.

This focus on clarifying and refining expands beyond physical stuff to overall life complexity and excess. I want to reduce the noise in my life so that I can focus on the people and the things that truly move me.

As I reflect, I see that I spent a great deal of time across the decade cleaning out all the spaces in my house and tossing, donating, or selling everything I could. Often, I found that what I thought I needed on the first pass of a given closet or drawer, I didn’t need on the second (or even third) pass.

Also, I downsized from a 2,700 square-foot house to a 1,250 square foot apartment. I sold my car. I sold an office building I’d acquired as an investment and got out of the real-estate and property-management business. I focused my energies on my marketing company and on my writing (albeit with far more time spent on the former than the latter—finances, don’cha know).

I continue to winnow my focus even still. Things and activities that do not serve me, I do not need to maintain. Time is short and gets only shorter, every day.

I like this learning. I like today’s perspective of crystallization and simplification far more than I like the perspective I had at the turn of the decade.

How the 2020s Will Change Me

I can’t predict how the 2020s will change me any more than I could have predicted the events and the evolutions of the twentyteens. Perhaps today, even more than then, I can affirm that none of us know our future.

The deepening sense of my mortality will likely only increase over the next decade; I can say this, at least, with relative assurance. And I hope that my reserves of wisdom and the crystallization of my perspective on what matters and how best to live my life will increase accordingly.

To close: Here’s to hoping that I can add more value to this world as I continue forward in it—more value than I could have added ever before, when I focused too much on too much that didn’t matter.