On Collagen and Creativity 

When you’re about to turn 30, women tell you stories about waking up on the first day of their third decade as if they just shot up from a week-long nightmare, a surgery where, before they were rolled into the operating room, everybody said “it’ll be over before you know it.” They emerged from their droopy-eyed fever dream overcome with deep despair, shell-shocked and panting, collagen zapped from their cells. Old.

When they realized they were 30, they’ll tell you, they couldn’t get out of bed. They cried all day. They had miniature mid-life crises—if I had only given a tiny bit more of a fuck in college, if I had studied abroad, if I had moved somewhere cool when I was young—in the span of a single cup of coffee. They realized, all at once, that their days of late-night Taco Bell binges and exploring their personal creative interests were over. Like a jet-plane ready to roll off the tarmac, the doors slammed shut. Locked, latched and tamper-proofed. No going back.

The more stories you hear about the first day of 30, the more cliché it sounds (and the more afraid you become). I was determined to let it pass without so much as stopping for a glass of water or a piece of birthday cake. But, as all the best writers and poets have said before me, aging comes for everyone, regardless of determination.

In my case, the day didn’t come on January 18, the day I turned 30. It came in the Percocet-padded aftermath of an early summer oral surgery. There were the ups and downs of the narcotics, in the ups a rediscovery of the earthy indie songs I loved as a 20-something, nothing to do but fade in and out of body-brain trances for an entire four-day weekend. I hadn’t sat still for that long since I was sick with the flu at 17, Feast on Scraps on repeat.

I tumbled into a freefall of unshackled youth, a tinge of adrenaline deep in my stomach and a cloud of creativity floating above my bed. When you are old, prescription drugs make you feel young. It is, I imagine, why old people get addicted to them as much as young people do. We are all chasing the high of youth, when it didn’t feel so indulgent to create, when our muscles weren’t so tense from all the clenching.

When I snapped out of it—sweaty and puffy-cheeked, my hair matted from the high—the come-down was worse than that of any late-night coke binge I ever hobbled out of in my actual 20s. This wasn’t the morning after but the real-life morning after, where you wake up and, god forbid, you’re 30.

The way I remember it, being young felt like floating belly up in a snow globe, little bursts of light and music and laughter refracting off the glass in every direction. Not focused on anything in particular, the world resembled the bright-colored bursts of the iTunes Visualizer, fractals zooming in and out at a poppy tempo. Fuzzy, fun, boundless, like being high on Percocet after having your wisdom teeth extracted.

It feels like that because it’s a memory, fogged up by the thick abstract brushstrokes of time. In reality there was a gritty monotony to it, with rusty joints that needed oiling and an upset stomach from all the floating. We’ve forgotten about all the overdraft fees and the stress of having to create an identity knowing damn well it takes people until they’re 30 to do that. We’ve forgotten what it was like to not have a good hairstylist and to not know what was causing our constant gastric upset. Still, there is a practicality to adulthood that makes the lines thicker and, in exchange, obscures the ability to create.

It is my personal theory that all the crying is about loss—not the loss of the free-floating snow globe adrenaline or even the collagen (yes, it’s part of it) but the loss of creative energy. The thing is that when you’re young you think the supply is endless. That it goes on forever, the artistic yield harvested from heartbreak, grief, longing, memories, not fitting in, an acceptance that everyone’s trying to be the star in their own indie movie, a comfortable chaos that always miraculously parts in the pursuit of art.

In fact, the yield is finite, like it was mined with jackhammers and now there’s nothing left. You can only write so many prose poems about realizing you’ll never again be 19 and drunk along the Hudson at dusk, an iPod and the freedom of the 20-something-block walk home. You hope in time the supply will be replenished and you’ll have something to write about, to paint about, to sculpt about. Creating without it feels like taking your pick to a wall of dust, only craters and echoes after every strike. You hope you don’t manufacture chaos for the sake of filling it back up.

I don’t know what they warned me about when I was young, because I’m fairly certain I wasn’t listening to anybody. But I don’t think a single person ever told me about the fact that, when you get old, you shed the layer of skin that houses your ability to make things that are interesting or pretty or somehow self-expressive. In its place you grow a layer of hardened pragmatism, where self-expression for the sake of it seems as wasteful as ordering takeout three nights in a row while your meal kit delivery wilts in the fridge.

Now you can’t do any of the things that you used to do to trick yourself into thinking you were artsy. You can’t embed a super-obscure Pitchfork song on your MySpace profile. You can’t skip school and lay in the grass in a park. You certainly can’t smoke cigarettes or get drunk in the daytime.

You hope your tooth becomes infected just so you can feel it again. You realize that’s the saddest excuse for addiction you can imagine, knowing the things that push people to keep the high alive, to breathlessly fight the urge to not take another. And then you are here, wishing to be young, pathetic.

How do you keep the flame alive without burning the house down across the street? Without turning shrapnel into poetry and lacerations into tattoos? Without perpetuating heartbreak? I don’t know the answer other than to treat the loss of creative energy like all the other kinds of losses you made art out of when you were young, shaping the emptiness into something tangible, and to hope that something might grow out of its equally hollow belly like it did when you were young.

Britny Kutuchief writes personal essays and over-emojied internet captions from her home in Akron, Ohio. Her work has been published in Rubbertop Review, Encounters Magazine, Barn Owl Review and others. She has an MFA in creative nonfiction from the Northeast Ohio Masters of Fine Art (NEOMFA) Consortium and works as a content manager at a digital marketing agency. While not writing, she pursues local infamy on Instagram @akronhouses.