WInstead I imagined, as most children might have, that adults have things that work at all on a clear border. Teens on one side; Rethink, responsibility, self-assurance, composition on the other.
A few weeks ago I passed 35. In the sun, I learned that old childhood suspected creeping in flowing flow; If any birthday should serve as a demarcator on that boundary, it must be one, is it not? And now, as the days are compatible with that imaginary point of inflection, it has become reinforcing the greatest lesson I have taken from “maturity that never comes CAN.
There is a wonderful type of book, however, in my nobility: a french comedy comedy show called BREF, the two times launched more than a decade separately. At 22, I left my country, the US, and a new one, TanyaBeing a part of me. Brof went out in 2011, in the year before I appeared in Strasbourg.
At the time, the series is not good for the way it is structured: 82 episodes, each one in one and two minutes of television television advertising in the US where they zoomed with all possible effects). I use Brof as a supplement to my French classes – while every short stage can be watched again until I have no longer drifting into an expression mass.
Throughout 82 stages, the pastrator of fast fire, “JE” (Kyan Khojandi) written and played, is archetype of a 30-year-old “different lot” that lives in Paris. The show is easily transferred to part because of his life; From the party to the party, bad mockery of poor mockery, obsession with observation, relationship relations. Until, of course, it all blows him.
Fourteen years ago, in 2025, Bref 2 opened Je today in early 40s, at the immediate after another short but extreme relationship. He lives in the same cycle, while everything changes in some way – especially his exes. The narration is slow this time, with six normal lengths periods instead of 82 hyperpeeds, because the themes are deeper, and we can no longer impress my millennia. Bouncing from the party to the party is not as appealing; Sometimes, you want to watch the tree out there outside the window, thinking of people there with whatever you have to think about.
Brof 2 is funny and acting, and a trip to Nostalgia for French Milenial audiences for whom this is culturally involved. Among the deepest themes emerged for Je in the last 14 years the things that stop us, or ways we return to ourselves. Ennui that comes with many first dates and no real material. The methods we wear in masks to please others and how it will fail at the end. The moments we take – or not. The times we go right down to the line, then throw the ball, failure makes us afraid.
What can’t touch Khojandi I used to get my sorry, always second prophecy of myself, moving the alternate universities, wondering if any of them are better. If I were probably happier with them.
If you become an immigrant, if you leave the place you are from well, there is a rending that has happened – within you and your people who do not leave with you. It is linguistics, it’s geography. It is in time and in cultural references. In our laughs, with what our emotions are tumbling. But I feel perfect French, I still find myself thinking sometimes, even as I know there’s no question that I don’t feel perfect Americans. If I sing France Gall In 1am, my earned reference is like legitimate as a memory that’s in my parents’ car, it’s listening while driving on summer holiday?
There is a loss here, yes, but more than that: it is a big bang, a birth to a new universe. And with it, a knowing that some of the things I’ve ever regretted it was important to put me where I am now: in a place that has been a part of it.
What do I like in 35? To put energy back to relationships with people I call family – inherited and chosen. To be more peaceful in owning periods and times when I’m wrong or failed, instead of lasting mental loops. To still open the universe I didn’t expect, like a strange conversation with a stranger on a train. To surround myself with friends who want to ask big, hard questions and okay to sit with the inconvenience without a satisfactory answer.
One of the uncomfortable things with no real response so I didn’t turn 35 in a vacuum. Years ago, after I stand as a witnessO witness, at my friend’s wedding Guillaume, he sent me a letter written on the back of a print. “I hope this is the beginning of a lifelong conversation about all the beautiful and terrible things we know and witness the side of the road,” he wrote.
I live in a life that is more awesome than I thought when I was 22, while watching a world worse: where an old man manages a genocide in Gaza; The second elderly launched, everyday, missile, drone and bombs of civilians in Ukraine; A third old man threatens to do the same in Taiwan; The fourth older person drives to log and drill and the pollution, and salivate the idea of modern-day Concentration camps.
Khojandi’s character Je, as video games as a child: at the end of Bref 2, he said he was always related to the video and where he had to go. As a child, I am in books and lego. I thought the analogy gave them a better one. LEGO arrived at a plan but, once you built what you think, starting to start and allow your imagination that is generous. Like books, the best stories are often entered at times suddenly making the main pages understood in a different way than the reader first.
In 35 I don’t have any answers. I am both a reader and a writer when it comes to my life. But I have bricks and pages. And 35 years from now, I hope the way I’m holding the bricks, and what I have written on the pages, meaningful in a way that I don’t see.
