a journal entry by Raneem Ali
artwork by Raneem Ali
It is more exhausting than it is funny, to get older but never wiser. It is as though the years and years of human experience just happen to fail you day by day. I look at the months that have passed and wonder how stupid I was, making decisions I would never make now. I still use the “well at least I got some good poems out of this!” as a way to not resent and regret. Yes, the two absolute worst human emotions (besides the green-eyed monster, but I’ve grown to like him to my surprise). But what if I didn’t have any good poems and was simply left with good memories and zero reasons to hate my younger (yesterday’s) self?
I’m 18 but when I was 16, I thought I figured out why we hurt the people we love, and wrote a silly little article picking my brain trying to find an answer. I’m 18 now and I don’t even agree with what 16-year-old Raneem said.
I think it’s beautiful and painful to think you’ve learned a lesson then watch yourself unlearn it just to sabotage yourself again. To look yourself in the mirror at any given moment and realize that you’ll never be that age again, to look at your mother and think of how she thought the very way you are thinking right now, to catch yourself reacting the same way your father would, people don’t get wiser, they give up trying to get wiser, and with a little bit of ignorance comes a little bit of bliss.
You would think aging makes you wiser but I happen to know a person 10 years older, who proved me so very wrong, they could only put on a performance for so long, but it was easy to see through the act. If anything, I feel like my 10-year-old self was wiser than me (and any 28-year-old), I resent her for one thing and that is that she only planned out her life till 18, and now that I’ve followed her plan and got to where she always wanted me to be, I don’t know what to do.
At the end of the day, who are you doing it for, if not your 10-year-old self?
(p.s- she lives inside of me still)