Looking back at my 35 year old self – #8

In 2013, I spent a term of studies in Nanjing, supported by a Hamer Scholarship. This was a transformative experience, and a moment to pause and reflect after an intense early period of migration. At the end of that year, I wrote down a series of journal entries, one-per-day, capturing my thoughts. COVID gave me the chance to revisit them: I was somewhat moved at meeting a younger version of myself. Now that I near the end of my PhD and a major book, and begin a new major venture in green energy, I realised patterns and struggles remained oddly similar. So, I thought I might share this journal here over the coming weeks – who knows, it might resonate with someone, trigger a useful insight, or just a passing moment of self-compassion.

22 december

I have just spent a long time on Facebook, over an hour maybe. Instead of reading a Chinese book and learning new characters, I followed the progress and recent posts of old friends or classmates.Have I just lost an hour of my time? Many people talk about Facebook in that way – time drain, waste of time. I’ve never really thought of time as something you could 'waste' – maybe there's something wrong with me? I enjoy memories. I enjoy looking back at the past, remembering what happened, recollecting. I have looked at the photos of H, and it brought back my life in Dublin, in their penthouse, with M, and C and A, and D.. I looked of pictures of A.M. and C. H. which brought me back to the lycee Kleber and my teenage years in Strasbourg. And a video with X., his video installations.Doing this, I can trace trajectories from my own long past: X., not a top student, but personable and anarchic, has become an architect of ephemeral light structures in Paris, for concerts and night-clubs – hype, uncertain substance? Y. married – stunningly beautiful as before, her husband looks friendly, both look wealthy, and that seems to matter to them.  Z. lost hair, grew a beard, and stands in a photograph with his Turkish boyfriend. J. is now working with a feminist band. W. is now HR manager for Hewlett Packard in Vienna, looking prim and efficient.I have been listening to ‘Tonight we are young’, over and over – seizing the last strands of my own youth, empathizing with young people. Am I refusing to grow,  still a student in my mid-thirties, desperately retaining youth, or acting like a responsible adult in a complex, fast-evolving world? I have, in certain areas, acted very responsibly. I own a house, I am in a stable and happy relationship. I founded an organization. I have recognized diplomas. I don’t have debt. I work in an area that I enjoy – though I hardly make money yet. People that I respect are encouraging me.After Facebook, I looked at other websites: the Shanghaiist and their sensationalist news from China. 'Tattoos you regret'. The appeal of the gruesome, the grotesque, the terrifying, the freakish, is old news: Plato wrote about it. A man with a hand grafted on his ankle. The woman whose husband gouged our her eye with his hand, or the woman who snapped off her husband’s penis with a pair of scissors. Who doesn’t want to see this?In part, I take this as research. For some reason, possibly the way my father brought me up, I have grown to believe that 'the best way to resist a temptation is yield to it'. I have played video games, sometimes to addictive levels, as a teenager – yet, I read extensively, passed exams, achieved things. Maybe not as much as if I hadn’t, maybe more. Who knows what bizarre unbalance might have come from me not playing Civ-Evo during my Wheeler Centre residency, or minesweeper when I was working from the Hub, or watched fewer random Facebook posts during my time in Nanjing.So dwelling in the delights of remembering, and looking at gruesome news on the internet – is this a privilege I will later regret, time available by not having children and not trying to make money, time wasted now I will regret in my old age? Or is it my way of letting off some steam, in the culture and society that I live in, a way of not getting more deeply addicted to whatever I could get addicted to?  For I have not had a television since I was 18, and how many hours have I saved by not watching stupid shows on TV?