Something that I think most people would agree with is that sometimes age brings wisdom. Now, I’m not claiming to be wise, please don’t take that the wrong way. Rather, I’ve found that, after the self-discovery process of my 30’s, I have stepped into the next decade of my life with a better handle on who I am. In fact, I really like who I am. There’s very little, if anything, that I regret about my past since all of it has led to who I am right now, and since I’m quite happy with where I’m at and the paths forward to more learning and becoming a better version of myself, I am finding new opportunities to be positive about my growth. My therapist is amused and supportive with a very “fucking finally” look on their face.

Like many gay guys born in the 80’s, there were significant developmental challenges in my teens and 20’s due to growing up in environments that didn’t support me having the usual big moments my heterosexual friends had. Much of my 20’s was about haphazard attempts to reclaim my teenage years, and I was mostly successful even if the opportunities could have been better handled.

Changing up my environment in my 30’s gave me a choice to consciously put a hiatus on some of the more wild and crazy activities and focus on, as I put it at the time, “myself, my friends, and a more whole human being”. That meant a lot, but the key pieces were a deep understanding of who I was, what I wanted, and my relationship with my childhood trauma. By the time I was 40 and my environment had changed again, I felt like I’d made the best of those years. I had become comfortable in the ability to be alone without being lonely, better at working with the neurodivergence in my brain, reconciling my religious trauma and deconstructing to a positive spot. Progress made towards my goals with more road ahead to continue.

I think this point of knowing who you are is important to the later eras of your life if you want to approach it authentically and adopt a worldview that brings the most joy and creativity to your day to day.

Coming back to willful ignorance and challenging beliefs, a powerful tool in personal development for me has been adopting the mindset I view as scientific. Looking at everything as an experiment, challenging everything, questioning what you’re told, giving yourself space to accept a truth but always able to change if new evidence is presented that changes that fact. I feel like this is probably an obvious statement for many people, but for a kid growing up in the haze of religious fundamentalist “truth” that resisted questioning and punished fact-finding, it was a huge leap to enter college, finally away from those restrictions, and be able to question everything I’d ever been taught to enable learning something real, or as real as anything could be when taught via another person’s interpretation of reality.

While I’m subject to falling into a bias trap at times or forgetting to stop and really question what’s being presented to me in that moment, my brain thrives on this practice of being objective and hunting for facts and “the truth”. This mindset guided me through years of religious exploration, ultimately leading me to atheism, which still stimulates conversation when you look at worldview I abandoned years ago, and resurrected again recently. And it’s made me love the phrase “mundane before magical”. I still see ghosts and ley lines everywhere, but I also know that the reality of our physical world has laws that we somewhat understand and often are more practical than what our imagination wants us to see. You generally live a little longer when you tackle the mundane with the proper amount of respect.

From childhood, I’ve been a creative kid enamored with fantasy and the otherworlds of my imagination. A lot of my art from an early age centered around fairy tales and magic and it was no surprise, in retrospect, that I’d find the mythologies of the world a topic of intense fascination in high school and an interest in metaphysics and the occult in my early 20’s. While I’ve always held magical reality at an arms distance out of a fear of falling into the delusions that plagued the religious communities I grew up in, I have always been happiest when finding time for more ritual and symbolism in my life.

Human beings thrive on ritual, something that has been studied in depth and highlights the benefits of shared experience, community, shared grief and joy, and cultural knowledge transfer. Storytelling fires up our imagination and the creatives in our circles inspire us to be more than what we are right now. It is one thing that has remained consistent as far as we are aware in our study of the human race over thousands of years. Ritual is one thing I removed almost entirely from life, or so I thought, until I realized that some part of me missed some of the more obvious observances like holiday traditions, a third place I visited every day, and marking my birthday each year. There is a rhythm, a connection to older parts of ourselves and the communities we belong to, that brings its own clock and language in the form of symbols to the table.

Magic is thick with symbolism and lessons learned through hidden secrets and shared rituals. While many people adopt the rituals of magical worldviews without fully embracing the application of magic as a tool, there is an obvious benefit to our lives at that level, but maybe even more when you decide to explore how your will and focus can alter the world around you. Where I feel like I missed out earlier in my life was in not fully acknowledging the power of these symbols used in daily life and the shared experience I tap into when integrating them. It took growing up and deconstructing to come around to this knowledge.

I hit a point last year where I felt shift in my ability to look at where I was going and where I was then. This may not seem like that big of a deal, but for a millennial, it’s pretty huge. Due to the period of time we live in and the insane things we’ve lived through at such a rapidly changing pace, our brains are wired to live more in the moment, not worrying about retirement, or saving our money, or having a five-year plan because who the hell knows what tomorrow will bring. Everything we had planned for in college came to a crashing halt in 2008. The models our parents told us would help us live a predictable and normal life as adults fell apart like a cookie left too long in a cup of coffee. Milestones didn’t match up and things didn’t make sense. They still don’t most of the time. Many of us are realizing there’s no map and it’s going to take carving some new channels in the future to create what we want out of life. Maybe because we can’t predict the future, we need both the grounding of facts and empowerment that magic provides.

Taking a very practical look at life and what tomorrow holds brings an almost mathematical way of living your life which can be very comforting in the prediction, but I notice, for me, it can suck all the fun out of it as well. Life needs a little magic, a little creativity, and a lot of whimsy. A logical approach is solid, but it sometimes needs a coating of fantasy to enable us to feel that emotional fulfillment that we wind up needing at one point or another.

Reconnecting with my creative side, thanks to the guidance of a handful of therapists and my own rabbit holes of learning, has highlighted how important it is for me, and I assume for the average human, to have other outlets that are a daily or weekly event. Our mental health is better cared for when we balance the sometimes cold reality of living with the warmth of exploration and imagination through a creative hobby. I’m thankful my brain’s odd wiring gives me no end of enjoyment in hobby hopping from one creative project to another, and I’ve found the framing of how I approach these activities is yet another layer of richness in the process. For me, that has always been immersing myself in the rituals and daily practice that you find in esotericism and metaphysical models. It’s also felt like the return I needed at this point in my life, and maybe it’s more important than ever with the way our world is now where there is the need for community and shared rituals to bring us out of a culture of individualism that divorces us from empathy and support and into a reality where we interact with kindness and respect for each other because of our differences.

At the end of the day, our biggest ally in the quest for a better life for ourselves and the people around us is maybe a choice to adopt a lens that doesn’t filter out the bad stuff but instead help us understand the bad and the good in a way that allows us to grow and be better than who we were yesterday.