Senses
I’ve felt old since I was a teenager. Shit, who is to say I didn’t feel old when I was a child? I was put into situations that a young, if not a grown adult, has the mental, physical, physiological and emotional capacity to endure. A series of challenges that are induced by the necessity to survive under abusive circumstances will do that to just about anybody who becomes conscious of the fact that at one point in their lives, they were deemed an object and never a subject.
When I was in my twenties, I wasn’t so much focused on the specificity of my age but about the actuality of being alive. I still grapple with the idea of feeling old as opposed to being old. I’ve been told that I’m not old, that I’m young but being affirmed in this way doesn’t seem to convince me otherwise. Thirty is a monumental age. Thirty-two, too, is monumental. Thirty-two means I’ve lived three decades and fourty-four days from today.
Three decades of life elucidates an elevation of one’s individual consciousness — of various facets of strength, and the incremental accumulation of wisdom. There are no prescriptive rules — no absolutes to determine the significance of age. Being in my thirties is what I make of it, but it still leaves the meaning of feeling old to question.
I understand feeling old is an indication of the chronicles of my experiences. In these experiences, an innumerable amount of them that I was not prepared for in body, mind and spirit, has made me feel as though I’ve transcended moments in time that I wasn’t supposed to enter — simply because I was not ready to.
I’ve seldom sifted through some essays that the Black perspective on age is not only corporeal, but it’s also ethereal. Every day that is lived is imbued with this sense of divinity. The coming of age for Black people is a circadian milestone. Global antiBlackness — white supremacy is what dissuades us to believe that aging is something to dread. I suppose this all goes without saying that I’ve answered my own question on the idea of feeling old as opposed to being old. This feeling is not something to be academicized or intellectualized. This is for me to live out.
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Patrick Jonathan Derilus is an American-born Haitian independent writer and Goodreads author who resides in Brooklyn, New York. Their pronouns are he, him, his, or they, them, theirs. They write poetry, short stories, and essays. They are published in RaceBaitR, Rabble Literature Magazine, Cutlines Press Magazine, Linden Avenue Literature Magazine, and elsewhere. They are the author of their 2016 anthological work, Thriving Fire: Musings of A Poet’s Odyssey and newest ebook, Perennial: a collection of letters.
