Safety Match for Dark Times
On awe, aging, and learning to find light in the ordinary.
My friends know I’ve had what I call a quiet wish, a quiet long-simmering desire to quit the myth of birthdays as time bombs and instead make them altars. Not chasing time, but living inside it.
For the past few years, that wish has taken shape as a ritual: every year, we go somewhere new, somewhere none of us have seen, just to remember we’re still alive. Not just me, all of us.
This year, it took us to New York. It was my first time seeing the city with my own eyes: the cinematic noise, the vapor ghosts rising from the streets, the terrifying architecture of dreams made steel. I still can’t believe how an eight-hour flight can make you feel like you’ve walked into your own parallel life. Every new place does that to me. It feels like I’ve interrupted someone else’s storyline and been cast in the lead. Like déjà vu, but sideways.
The truth is, it didn’t take me 32 years to realise what I’m about to say. It took me 13. Thirteen years of adulthood. And most of those weren’t lived but endured, spent unwinding trauma like a badly packed suitcase and learning that healing isn’t some elegant unfurling, but a mess of duct tape and repeat mistakes.
If I’m being honest, only four of those years have felt like mine. Mine in the sense that I was the one driving the car, not just gripping the seatbelt. (Assuming we even get to drive. Assuming free will is more than a flattering illusion the universe tells us so we don’t fall apart. Maybe we’re just the weather, thinking we’re the sky.)
What I’ve learned in those 13 years is this: there are only two types of people in the world. Those who pee in the shower and liars.
It sounds dumb. It is dumb. But maybe that’s the point. You start to realize life isn’t made of big philosophical truths —it’s built from tiny, stupid, weirdly universal moments no one talks about but everyone recognizes. And once you start noticing those things, you start noticing everything.
And that’s when it hit me. The thread running through all the good things, the true things, the things that kept me going even when I didn’t want to: it was awe.
That’s it. That’s the whole cheat code. The answer to almost everything is awe. Not money (even if it buys you a front-row seat). Not status. Not how fast you’re pedaling to stay in one spot. Just awe.
Being in f*cking awe all the f*cking time.
Awe at how a stranger can walk into your life on a Tuesday and become a lighthouse.
Awe at your own body for surviving things it had no business surviving.
Awe at the fact that we put holes in the sky and call them planes, and they mostly work.
Awe at a sentence that cuts you open and sews you back together in the same breath.
Awe at the precision of your best friend’s laugh.
Awe at your dog knowing exactly when to come sit beside you.
Awe at your own forgiveness. How it blooms in secret even when you swore you’d never offer it.
Awe at your hands. How they just know how to hold things: grief, groceries, other people.
Awe at the way plants lean toward light, without being taught.
Awe at your parents’ love story or the quiet, dignified loneliness they carried instead.
Awe at the fact that people fall in love on trains. And in comment sections. Or on dating apps.
Awe at the smell of something baking and how it rewrites the atmosphere of a room.
Awe at a sunset so tacky and overdone it feels like God tried to paint it with a hangover and a Lisa Frank palette.
Awe at the silence between two people who once loved each other and now live like ghosts in each other’s memory.
Awe at the brain’s ability to both obsess and forget, often at the same time.
Awe doesn’t need you to be perfect. Or stable. Or accomplished. It just needs you to notice. That’s the hardest part. Noticing. Awe is what happens when you pay attention. And these days, attention is the rarest form of currency.
I used to think adulthood would feel like a room I’d finally earned the key to. But now I know it’s more like finding light switches in the dark. You fumble. You bruise your shin. You learn. And if you’re lucky, someone lights a candle first.
So yeah. Thirty-two. Thirteen. Whatever you want to call it. I’m still fumbling for the switch. Still stubbing my toe. But lately I find the light faster.
And when I do, it’s not clarity I feel.
It’s awe.