Peak Again

The best year of your life may be behind you. Time to have another one.

The other day I was mindlessly scrolling through Twitter, the joy slowly leaking from me like a pin-pricked balloon, when something woke me up. It was a tweet by someone I don’t know, in which the tweeter linked to a piece she wrote years earlier. Her commentary: “Pretty sure I peaked in 2011.”

Hush, little baby. Mama knows. I, too, peaked in 2011. I quit my terrible job with no idea what I’d do next and the sort of delusional confidence only a 24-year-old can muster. “I have enough saved to pay rent for three months!” I justified, forgetting about that food thing that costs money. “Certainly, that’s long enough to find a new job,” I reasoned, pacing my hallway and shredding the wallpaper with my fingernails. “And not just any job. A writing job!” I howled at the moon like a rabid, unemployed wolf.

But I wasn’t wrong! That year, I published tons of work with places I respected, had a full-time writing job by year’s end, and even got tweeted at by two of my childhood idols: Judy Blume and Ricki Lake. I was not just peaking, I was MOUNT EVERESTING.

It didn’t dawn on me until last year that my life and work have been on what I perceive to be a silent, downward trajectory since then. I haven’t been writing as much. I haven’t taken any risks. I pretty much refuse to do anything “scary,” because why take chances when there’s like, 40 Netflix Original Series on tap?

Mmm. Mostly because that’s a totally depressing way to live. If I peaked four years ago and it’s all downhill from here, that means—according to my latest tarot reading—I have forty years of plummeting to do before I die. In the words of Peggy Lee, is that all there is?

The short answer is no. The long answer is that I’m in a self-imposed rut. Maybe you are, too. The idea of “peaking” is a gift that our present self gives to our past self. Our brains filter out all the undesirable details associated with our peak moment, leaving behind a sexy montage of us being the fucking best at everything. When I think of my go-to peak year, I conveniently forget that aside from some small writing achievements, I was eating mozzarella sandwiches everyday, I’d just been diagnosed with a disease I’ll have for the rest…