I’ve been sitting with time recently. Watching her slowness to start much of anything, the languidness she chooses. The way the future arrives after years of adding one piece at a time, because that is the fastest pace time will allow. Being on the edge of my mid-twenties, it’s the first time I can see how time moves very clearly. I think about aging and technology, generational rifts, investing. I consider all the projects I want to do, how I’d like them to be done, and how quickly. I am humbled into accepting that my wishes are too ambitious for the timeline I’m allowing.

It’s easier to observe time’s fickleness as an outsider. I have now loved certain things and people for a full decade of my life, been able to feel the real-time acceleration, and look back at it. I listened to Halsey’s Zane Lowe interview in awe, remembering what it felt like to see them release Badlands and then rise in popularity, become a star in every sense of the word, and struggle with the height of it. I sat with the version of them that was so knowledgeable and mature in my high school brain — and much younger than me now. I consider how it all shifts, how you think you know the world when you’re 18. How one day you feel you can never know enough.

I’m at that age where many of the artists I admire emerged with something they had built for almost a decade. It’s an existential disaster. I keep looking at my hands and everything I’ve ever made feels translucent, not good enough, not quite what I want or need right now. Just a series of tweaking, pivoting, and perfecting. The Artist’s Way, if you will.

When I told my friend how I felt, how I hadn’t done much of anything, she laughed before telling me off. I know I do many different things, but I do them haphazardly. I’ve been writing and posting online for ten years, with varying levels of interlude, sharing my thoughts. The album I released last month took me three years to do and five years to gain the skills I needed. Things take time to become. I hate it.

I’ve been trying to prepare for “the next thing”, whatever that means. In my head, the rest of this decade should be used to build something for myself. Something I can be proud of pouring time into, but I can’t sense what it is. I’ve never been a person who heavily commits to any particular thing, preferring the swirl of creative pursuits, round robin style. What does that build other than a cyclone of chaotic attempts toward no particular goal?

It is useless for me to hold onto the idea that growth is linear. To me, time is a mass, a solid we move through that slows things down, makes them feel sequential. It’s the only way the spiral makes sense to me, the repetition of before with different variants. What my life is forming into is unclear. Maybe it’s clarifying to me what it would like to become. I’m trying to sense where to shake for gold. The sludge of time is sticky and stubborn.

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