I will be 35, I have no answers, but I learned one thing: we all only fly it | Alexander Hurst

WI had little plans for most children that the adults probably did things and one day on the other side I would be a clear limit. Adolescence on one side; Mature, responsibility, self -confidence, composition on the other.

I turned 35 a few weeks ago. When the day came closer, I found that the old suspicion of childhood entered again. If any birthday should serve as a decrator of this border, should it be, isn't it? And now when the days are further away from this imaginary turning point, it has become a reinforcement of the probably largest lesson become.

However, my adulthood so far has a strange way of booking: a French comedy show called Bref, which have been two seasons more than a decade away. When I was 22 years old, I left my country, the USA, and let a new, France, become part of me. Bref came out in 2011, a year earlier before I appeared in Strasbourg.

At that time, the series was remarkable for the way it was structured: 82 follows, each between one and two minutes, where it contains an ultra-fiel-voice-over (such as the role in drug advertising in US television, in which they are through all possible side effects). I used Bref as a supplement to my French courses – since every short episode could be seen again and again until I learned to choose the individual words until they no longer fell into an expressive mass.

In these 82 episodes, the Rapid Fire narrator “Je”, the Rapid Fire narrator is “Je”. (written and played by Kyan Khojandi) was the archetype of a 30-year-old “type of loser” who lived in Paris. The show moved so quickly because his life did; From party to party, bad joke to bad joke, obsession with obsession, relationship with the relationship. Until of course everything blows away on him.

Fourteen years later, in 2025, Bref 2 now opened in the early 1940s with ever after the ruins of another short -lived but intensive relationship, which accelerated and crashed too quickly. He kept living the same cycle while everyone else has developed in any way – especially his exen. The story is slower this time, with six episodes with a normal length instead of 82 hyperspitzen, perhaps because the topics are deeper, life is thicker and we can no longer move so quickly, in a way that my millennials can probably refer to. Jumping from party to party is not that attractive; Sometimes they just want to stare on the tree in front of the window and wonder with them what this tree has to think according to everything he has observed in return.

Bref 2 is funny and moving and a nostalgia trip for the French thousand -year -old audience, for which it became a cultural point of reference. The deeper topics that have ever arisen in the past 14 years include the things that hold back to us or how we hold back. The Ennui, which is associated with too many first dates and nothing really materializing. The way we put on masks to please others and how it simply fails us in the end. The opportunities we enter – or not. The failures that we go to the line and then drop the ball, the failure is pursuing us.

What Khojandi does not touch is regret. I used to fix myself on my regret, constantly checked myself, put alternative universes and asked me whether one of them might be better. When I'm happier in them.

If you become an immigrant when you leave the place you are finally, a rending will occur – in you and from you and the people who have not left with you. It is linguistic, it is geographical. It exists in time and in cultural references. In what we laugh about in what pulls our feelings. But I will ever feel completely French, I still ask myself sometimes, even if I know without a question that I don't feel fully American anymore. Is my acquired reference just as legitimate as a memory of being in my parents' car when I sing to France's Gall at 1 a.m. and listen to a summer vacation while driving?

There are losses here, yes, but also more than that: it is a big bang, a birth of a new universe. And together with the realization that some of the things I once regretted were indispensable to bring myself exactly where I am: with a place that has become part of me as I became part of it.

What do I want at 35? To bring energy back into relationships with the people I call family – both inherited and selected. To own times and cases when I was wrong or failed instead of lingering in mental loops. Still being open to the universe to throw me into the unexpected, like a surprisingly deep conversation with a stranger on a train. To implement me with friends who want to ask big, difficult questions and who are okay to sit with the discomfort that is often not a satisfactory answer there.

One of these unpleasant things without real answer is that I didn't become 35 in a vacuum. Years ago after I was a stand TémoinOr witness, at my friend Guillaume's wedding, he sent me a note that was written on the back of a print. “I hope that this is only the beginning of a lifelong conversation about all the beautiful and terrible things we learn and experience on the go,” he wrote.

I live a life that is far more unbelievable than I would have introduced it to the age of 22 while I was watching a world that is so much worse: where an old man monitors a genocide in the Gaza; A second old man starts every day rockets, drones and bombs with civilians in Ukraine. A third old man threatens to do the same; A fourth old man drives the logging and bores and pollution and puts the idea of modern concentration camps.

Khojandi's character ever seems to go into video games as a child: At the end of Bref 2, he notices that he had always seen life as a video game, if he did things right, he would take the place and get where he had to go. As a child I was in books and Lego. I think the analogy you offer is better. The Lego came with a plan, but when they built what they should be, it was a lot of fun to leave their imagination wild. With regard to books, the best stories are often threaded with moments that suddenly make the previous pages meaningful in other ways than the reader first understood.

At 35 I have no answers. I am both a reader and the author when it comes to my life. But I have bricks and sides. And in 35 years I hope that the way I stacked the brick and what I wrote on the pages will make sense in a way that I can't see yet.