There is the old adage that the older you get, the more conservative or right-leaning you become. In my 30th year, I can tell you that there is absolutely 0 truth in it for me, personally. Quite the opposite in fact. The older I get, the more angry I am. The older I get, the less satisfied I am to sit on my hands and be anything but loudly liberal in my beliefs. In my home county of Essex, there are quite a significant number of apolitical or 'not political' people, as well as lots of Reform and Tory voters. It's a strange time and I understand why some want to detach themselves from politics but, fundamentally, that is impossible. We now live - and perhaps always did just with less technology to show it - in a heavily politicized and vulnerable society. One of the central elements to me growing gradually out of my twenties and into my - hopefully - thriving thirties has been the ability or the experience of dealing with that truth.
To preface this again, this 30 Reflections For 30 Years is an expression of my experience growing older and getting closer to my thirties. This is not meant as a copyable playbook or a fountain of perfect advice, merely the titbits from a life punctuated by a series of events. Let me start with that point of Apoliticism. When I was younger, I quite liked and respected centrists. Those that sat somewhat on the fence of politics and did not seem themselves as radical or as belonging to any one group, just occasionally swaying in one over the other. I also thought it quite a blissful idea to be apolitical, someone that went further than the centrist by not indulging or supposedly caring in politics at all. Today, not so much. Today, I think centrism is largely a lie told by people who do not want to admit their true allegiances because of a shame or a nervousness to dissapoint different factors of their life; the liberal to their right-wing parents, the right-wing person to their left-wing friends from childhood. I generally feel the same about people who say they are 'not political'. Yes, you are, you just don't want to admit what it is you're political about or, more likely, you are not aware of the way politics has been ingrained into our society and in the broadness of the term.
The broadness of the term is the other thing that has shifted across 30 years of life. Initially, like many, I thought of politics as economic policy, wartime prime minister's, right-wing immigration anger and left-wing socialism. All of which is still relevant to the conversation but on a deeper level, politics is:
The safety of my friends and of their friends, of children and of parents. It is the safety that comes from not always the shape of personal choice, but of lucky and predetermined circumstances.
The ability to hate immigrants because you are not the immigrant escaping.
The ability to fly to and exist in another country without your very way of being questioned and used as a weapon against your life.
The way you get to dress.
The hatred your neighbour has.
The love your teacher has.
The indifference your wartime grandfather has.
A poem about flowers in a blossomed field.
The price of Freddos.
The list goes on. Things that feels small, things that feel more like 'the way the world evolves' and not the elements of life that have been moulded around us by those with more power than we can ever possibly comprehend.
This is worth fighting for and the sooner we realise how deep the influence of our political leaders and beliefs go, the sooner we can reeducate the planet to a better future. What I do struggle with though is sustaining some concept of emotional strength in the face of destabilized political nightmares.
You see it a lot at the moment: we want to stay informed and to inform, we want to fight for freedom and for equality and we want the best for the world but we also want to stay off social media, to protect our hearts and our minds. It's an impossible balance - how can we protect ourselves when so many of our peers don't care? Someone has to do something and yet we are left feeling hopeless, exhausted and frequently drained of the energy we need to fight forward and still live our lives.
That balance, that frustration is something that I have been fighting with my entire life. Or as long as I have been politically engaged. If there is anything, I want to work on in my thirties, it is the ability to continue to be active, to feed the message of equality and basic human rights into my work and into my pieces where it feels natural and yet to still know when to step away from the news, to step away from my phone and preserve myself.
Preservation and protest go hand in hand. Some days, the most important thing to do is shout and walk the street and repost and reeducate. Some days, the most important thing to do is rest and recharge; the fight can't continue if too many of us are too flat to leave the house or to hurt to speak the truth. Onward to a better world!
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