35, I don’t have an answer, but I learned one thing: We’re all just on the wing | Alexander Hurst

wI rarely imagine that, like most children, adults have solved everything and one day I will find myself on the other side of a clear boundary. One side of adolescence; maturity, responsibility, self-assurance, the other composition.

A few weeks ago, I was 35 years old. As the day ticked on, I found my childhood suspicion spread again. If any birthday should be used as the boundary for that boundary, it should be this boundary, isn’t it? Now, as the days are further impressed than that imagined turning point, it has become the biggest lesson I have gained from “adulthood”: Most of us are just waving it most of the time through processes that have never been fully achieved. Become.

However, so far, I have a strange book ending as an adult: the French comedy show Bref, whose two seasons are more than a decade apart. When I was 22, I left my country, the United States, and made a new country, Francebe a part of me. Bref came out in 2011 the year before I showed up in Strasbourg.

At the time, the series was known for its structure: 82 episodes, one to two minutes each, with super fast voiceovers (like a portion of the drug ads on American TV, they amplify in all possible side effects). I used Bref as a supplement to my French course – because I could watch each short episode over and over again until I learned to pick individual words until they no longer flowed with a expressive mass.

In these 82 episodes, quick shot of the narrator “JE” (written and played by Kyan Khojandi), is the prototype of the 30-year-old “genre loser” living in Paris. The show is so fast, partly because his life is indeed so. From parties to parties, bad jokes to bad jokes, obsessed with obsession, relationships with interpersonal relationships. Until of course, it all blows to him.

Fourteen years later, in 2025, Bref 2 began to open in JE in his 40s, which collapsed too quickly after another wreck of a short and firm relationship. He lived the same cycle over and over again, and everyone else developed in some way, especially his exe. This time the narrative is slower, with six normal length plots, rather than 82 super matches, maybe because of the deeper theme and thicker life, we can no longer be able to do with the way my millennials might have been related to it. The bounce from a political party to a political party is not that attractive; sometimes you just want to stare at the tree outside the window and wonder what that tree has to think of us after everything that is rewarded.

Bref 2 is fun and moving, a nostalgic journey to French millennial audiences, and it becomes a reference point for culture. The deeper themes that JE has emerged over the past 14 years are the things that hinder us from retreating or the ways we stop ourselves. Ennui comes with too many early dates that aren’t really implemented. The way we wear masks to please others and how we can ultimately fail us. We bring opportunities – or without. We went online directly and then lost the ball, and the failure bothered us.

Khojandi didn’t have much contact with it is a pity. I used to fix my regrets, constantly guessing myself, spinning in place of the universe, wondering if any of them could be better. If I might be happier.

When you become an immigrant, there is a kind of run happening when you leave your position – you are inside, you and the people you are not with. It is language and geography. It exists in temporal and cultural references. What drags on emotions in the things we laugh at? But I will feel completely French, and even if I no longer feel completely American anymore, I will still find myself wondering sometimes. When I sing Gal, France Is the reference I obtained as legal as it was in my parents’ cars, listening to it while driving for the summer?

There is a loss here, yes, but not just that: it is a big bang, the birth of a new universe. With that, something that I once regretted was essential when putting me completely in my current position: a place has become a part of me, just as I am a part of it.

What do I want to be 35 years old? Re-establishing the energy with the people I call family – both inheritance and choice). Having times and instances where I was wrong or failed is more relaxed than wandering in the psychological cycle. Still open to the universe, bringing me into surprises, like having a surprisingly in-depth conversation with strangers on a train. To be with friends who want to ask big questions, who can sit there with discomfort, often they don’t have a satisfying answer.

One of those uncomfortable things that don’t have a real answer is that I’m not 35 years old in a vacuum. A few years ago, I stood Témoinor witness, at the wedding of my friend Guillaume, he sent me a note with the back of the print. “I hope it’s just the beginning of a lifelong conversation about all the beautiful and horrible things we learn and witness in the process,” he wrote.

My life is incredible than I thought when I was 22 years old, and watching a worse world: An old man was in Gaza where genocide was supervised; a second was fired day after day, missiles, drones and bombs were fired on civilians in Ukraine; a third was threatening to do the same to Taiwan. The fourth old man gradually increased logging and drilling and pollution and salivated with modern ideas Concentration camp.

Khojandi’s character JE seems to be working in video games as a kid: At the end of Bref 2, he says he always thinks life is like video games, and if he does it right, he will level up and get where he needs to go. When I was a kid, I loved books and LEGOs. I think the analogy they offer is better. Lego comes with a plan, but once you build what you should, start over and make your imagination even more interesting. As for books, the best stories are usually momentary, and these moments suddenly make the front page different from the way the reader understands it first.

At 35, I had no answer. In my life, I am both a reader and a writer. But I do have bricks and pages. After 35 years from now, I hope I’ve stacked the bricks together, and what I wrote on the page, will make sense in ways that I can’t see.