A forever a young idiot

Home » Archives for August 2026

26. An insignificant-sounding age, the one right before you hit your late twenties, and just after 25, which somehow feels like a milestone in itself: a quarter of a century. A strange in-between. I am over a month late writing this birthday Tale, I usually always feel the need to sit and look back at what I have achieved or what I am late on, the moment my birthday hits. This year, however, all I am doing is looking forward. I, for once do not feel any particular attachment to the past, I have come to a point where it feels boring and I have learned, slows down many things. I have had the tendency to romanticise everything and have the talent of delicately storing memories wether it is through little objects, writing or just simply remembering. But, that attachment no longer feels the same. Because romanticising also makes you forget the bad that came with the good; the bad that held you back and scarred you deeply— the kind that can lead you towards the same vicious cycles that everyone knows, are difficult to break.

I have been in the mood to break shit anyway. 

But for the sake of tradition, I will look back just a little. 

Maybe the whole “fully developed frontal lobe” thing is a real thing. I am genuinely floored by many of the perspectives I have had in the past, how wrong I was on many things and how sure I was on being right about them. I have always been, annoyingly so, a bit of a know-it-all. Maybe it comes from hearing that I was “mature for my age” or an “old soul” ever since I was 12. Over time, those labels gave me an inflated sense of wisdom, making me believe I was the kind of person who simply “knew life.”

I have also always been told that I looked older or at the very least carried myself like I was older but recently it seems like the whole world does not believe that I am past the age of 21. A woman asked my mum which of her children was the eldest, as I stood next to my 16 year old, braces-wearing brother. Maybe the realisation that I actually know very little and have been questioning about what I thought I knew has reversed aged me. I have been Benjamin Buttoned. I have been deeply humbled about the realisation that I actually know shit all, and I have been trying to take it on the chin. I have never felt so young in my life and I have finally truly understood the infamous saying “progress isn’t linear”. You’d think I’d be disheartened by all this but I feel weirdly at peace being at square one. The fear and the anxiety of the unknown has turned to the type of anxiety you feel before graduation or a party you’ve been looking forward to all week. I am open to new surprises. 

Speaking of surprises, I’ve had many recently, and they just keep coming. Not the kind that catch you off guard and suddenly appear out of nowhere. I don’t know how else to explain it, but they feel more like planting seeds without knowing what kind of plants they’ll become—tending to them every day, watching them slowly grow, until one day they bloom and you discover all these different flowers, ones you never could have imagined.

Those ones.

I feel like I’ve been operating my life and business somewhat blindly for a while now. I’ve come to understand that if I spend too much time planning, trying to predict every possible outcome, I end up paralysing myself and ultimately, I don’t do anything at all.

I figured putting energy into something will never lead to nothing. Since I didn’t know what I wanted, I was ready to get anything, anything at all. And so I just put energy out there, trying to stay consistent with certain things and experimenting with others, using only intuition as guidance. And boom, things bloomed. They bloomed in clumsy and awkward ways, yet there is nothing more beautiful than seeing your work come to life, to think that they were once only in your head and here there are now, tangible and real. How letting go of expectations and allowing things to unfold organically will, I find, most of the time be better than expected. I feel like I sound cliché, but you know what? If sayings are so commonly said, than there must be truth to them. And if we stopped rejecting the basic mantras, out of the necessity to be “cool”, maybe we’d realise that it is actually just a shortcut to happier days. So “Live, Laugh, Love” may actually be the secret to it all. 

Anyways, all of this to say that I feel dumber that I did yesterday but I am happy to be. I think it’s just an indicator that I am entering a new mind space or chapter in my life, one that I will have to learn. Someone once said that if you are the smartest in the room, than it is time to change rooms—I wholeheartedly agree with that and happy to be the idiot. Learning to embrace my lack of knowledge on many things has been one of the best gifts I have given myself, a type of grace that truly has lifted a lot of weight off of my shoulders. I used to say that I wish I could just get paid to learn and I guess it’s sort of what is going on here, my dream is coming true. 

Many people around my age feel old, because you’re getting closer to your thirties which is basically when adulthood really starts and the trial has expired, but I don’t know—I feel like I have trouble feeling old. I don’t think I ever will feel old. What old people are to me are wise people who know a whole lot about life. And once they feel like they know it all, I think that’s when they really start to age: when they feel like there’s nothing left to discover.

So I think the secret to longevity isn’t the Mediterranean diet or red light therapy, but simply curiosity. That strong desire to learn, to see, to understand something new, the kind of curiosity that comes so naturally to a child, is what I think can keep you young forever.

Vahine Blaise, Bali, Indonesia,

August 2026