I have a friend, Billy, who writes every day. He writes professionally for a blog and also sets aside time daily to write for himself. Sometimes he sets aside a weekend to crank out a play or a submission for this or that competition. He and my friend Shelby have an almost one-year old now; perhaps his writing routine has changed but I’m betting not. Billy is a routine guy.

I deeply desire to be like Billy. If not for you, my audience, at least for me—some relief from the million profundities, anxieties, and absurdities doing the mambo in my crowded mind. Unfortunately, I can’t maintain a routine to save my life.

I thrive on a looming deadline. I like to make a huge mess over the course of several days, then clean everything top to bottom on a Saturday. Read five books in a week, then none for five months. Walk twenty miles one week, zero the next. Process all the mail, pay all the bills, then neglect the mail pile a month (or two). Feel every feeling known to man all at once, then sleep for six hours. Sort of like a volcano; quiet, dormant even, then I explode.

Somehow this works for me. I am, shockingly, productive, which is to say I get shit done. Sure, I could do with a little less cortisol and a little more consistency but I’m beginning to accept that I am who I am.

My therapist tells me I’m a rhythm person, rather than a routine person. Even if she’s saying this just to make me feel better, it does make sense to me that all of our brains are wired to perform in different, albeit complementary ways. Some of us evolved to wrestle a bear, then take a nap.

Anyhow, that’s five paragraphs to say I wish I wrote more and more often and that I’ve missed this space.

A real topic shift here, but I get weird in the fall.

Not like Halloween-spooky weird (of which I’m a fan), but rather a morose and constant pondering of the unrelenting march of time and the inevitability of death weird. Yes, I am available to come liven up your next party.

It starts in August with what I’ll call visceral nostalgia.1 You know how there is just something in the air in August that signals the end of summer, the end of something? The light starts slanting towards winter, triggering something in the brain that says, at least in my neck of the woods, “the sun won’t be here forever.” The lower it sits in the sky, the deeper my longing.

The change is all the more profound in a college town. Students return and with them an influx of youthful energy, a veritable sea of bright-eyed 20-somethings clad in blue and gold. I always loved school, especially the return to school, and so I begrudge them a bit: both because they’re young and because I’ll never get to experience a beginning quite like that again.

We live high up on a hill looking over Morgantown and, when fall rolls around, we can hear the Morgantown High School football games—let me tell you, the cheers and the marching band and the loud speaker take me back. I’m seventeen, naive in love and a cheerleading uniform waiting for my football player (#77) outside the Hurricane High School field house on a Friday night. I get a lump in my throat because how does two decades go by so quickly and, because I’m human, I wonder who is also thinking of me.

The thing is, I don’t know that girl anymore but I remember how it felt—to be hopeful and romantic, lost and innocent. And of course I ache to go back in time with two decades’ worth of lessons learned and protect her a little, though the heartache was worthwhile and I remember that, too.

Come September, I’m another year older. I always feel a little sad around my birthday. I’m typically recovering from August’s bout of nostalgia and, though I am, of course, grateful for each trip around the sun, I wouldn’t describe aging as, um, fun.

There is a lot of troubling math involved with growing older. If I say, “I’m 39,” well, fine, that’s not that old. But if I say “I’m 39 and trying to have a baby,” you’re having a really different conversation. “I graduated from high school in 2003” is, somehow, not the same numerically as saying “I graduated from high school two decades ago.” Other irksome numbers: waist size, quantity of wrinkles on forehead and gray hairs on head, ages of your friends’ children, ages of your pets, ages of your parents, number of years ‘til death if you’re lucky enough to live to, say, 75. I hope, I hope, I’m lucky.

These numbers weigh on me. I’ve always, since I can remember, been a mournful, ponderous little weirdo. There was a period of time where I would listen to the Titanic soundtrack to make myself cry before I fell asleep. I regularly sat on the roof at my mom’s house, contemplated the stars and the meaning of life, and wept. I’ve been convinced since an early age that I will die young because it feels like a fittingly emo end for such an emo human.2

You’re like, “okay, Linds, this is depression.” It’s not, I promise! (If anything, I think it’s egotism but that’s an exploration for another day.) I am just madly, head-over-heels in love with being alive. The unfortunate byproduct is that I regularly obsess over what total and absolute bullshit it would be if I were to die.

A few years ago, my brother-in-law Alex introduced me to the idea of the “highly sensitive person” by laughing at the idea that there is such a thing. I also was like, “haha, people are weiners” but that quickly turned into “wait, but I’m a wiener - maybe I’m a HSP!”

In short, a HSP is someone whose brain processes all information very deeply, including emotions, thoughts, and sensory input.3 I think the language on this front is constantly evolving—HSPs are sometimes described as neurodivergent and/or as having sensory processing sensitivity.4 Whatever the language, I’ve found the framework helpful for understanding and embracing my tendencies for overthinking and being overwhelmed by all the feelings. (And if you’re trying to square this highly sensitive Lindsey with maybe the only Lindsey you know who bulldozes, confronts, fights, and strong-arms, well yea, me too.)

I don’t mean to imply that the average person doesn’t fret about aging; I imagine no one alive is walking around without at least a little anxiety about growing old. I just think about it a lot, probably too much, especially in moments—like now—of massive suffering. It’s not lost on me how much of a privilege it is to contemplate aging and death in the abstract when so many of our worldly neighbors are just trying to survive wars that they didn’t cause and don’t deserve. I think about how their desire to live and be free is all bound up with my desire to live and be free, but they aren’t, by the nature of geography and borders and geopolitics and tyrants and dumb luck, and can’t be the same.

Now it’s October and my weird season (subjective) is coming to a close. Autumn is putting on its final, dazzling display of golds, ochres, and scarlets, milkweed seeds are floating on the air, and the bees are gobbling up the last of the pollen from my still-blooming cosmos. I, like the trees, will root down and rest.

In an hour, I’ll go talk with my therapist about how I still dream about my high school boyfriend, how we never really know our parents—only who they are in relation to our expectations of them, how to keep showing up with an open heart in such a cruel world, and how to cope with the knowledge that someday I and everyone I know and love will be dead.

I often say, “If I die tomorrow, just know that I’m going to be so pissed off about it” to which my husband, always pragmatic, replies “no you won’t, ‘cause you’ll be dead.”

Getting old is scary and dying, at least for me, is scarier. But goddamn, what a gift to have experienced things that are so beautiful and tragic you never shake them (first love, a mountaintop, a birth, a death), to be alive and behold, to mourn in advance, the beautiful and tragic things to come (lifelong love and friendship, democracy, a dying planet, death, rebirth).

I like Virginia Woolf’s approach:

“I don’t believe in aging. I believe in forever altering one’s aspect to the sun. Hence my optimism.”