An ode to ageing like the Smashing Pumpkins

Throw out your cares and fly

Something a little different from me today, GFPs. Normal service (or as normal as I’m managing in the final months of book writing) should resume in the next edition - unless of course another band from my past instigates an existential crisis in me…then all bets are off.

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A little known fact about me is that in my youth I was a massive Smashing Pumpkins fan. I even have the decades-old tattoo to prove it.

I had all their CDs which I played relentlessly all the way through on rotation, I could sing every song back to front. But when it turned out that they were playing a concert near me, with almost the complete original line-up as well, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to see them.

I haven’t listened to the pumpkins in years. Not because I don’t still love them — I will always love them — but because the feelings they bring up for me are…complicated.

My heavy pumpkins era was during my mid to late teens. That time in your life where you are nothing but potential. Where you are passionate and hungry and determined and so sure and yet so unsure and the world is brimming with the lives you might live. Most of us won’t yet have made any irrevocable mistakes, or even just the major life choices that lead you down specific paths — and, more specifically, close off others, each choice narrowing down the lives available to you.

I think looking back at that time in your life must feel bittersweet for anyone — not least because of the youth-obsessed culture we live in. We don’t think of ageing as the privilege it truly is, the only alternative being of course death. Rather we think of it as little more than a process of breakdown, something shameful even, that we must cover up with hair transplants and botox injections and dermal fillers. And so the loss we must inevitably feel over the paths we didn’t take is compounded by the loss of the youth we didn’t appreciate.

For me specifically though, that era ended rather abruptly when I made one big mistake which precipitated nearly a decade of increasingly poor choices. A time I look back on with both regret at the youthfully careless decisions that led to it and a kind of horror at the thought that I might have got stuck there, in a life where I was so sad and lonely and unfulfilled, and so incapable of seeing a way out (until, thankfully, I was).

And so when I listen to the pumpkins I am reminded of the time just before it all went so horribly wrong for me. That time where I hadn’t yet made the mistakes I would go on to regret for so long. That time where I had no inkling that you can make choices that can leave you reeling for a decade (I feel I should clarify here that I didn't do anything criminal or uniquely terrible, I just messed up a major relationship and went on to make a series of pretty typical young adult missteps which led me to a very unhappy place both personally and professionally).

And then I feel sad — so sad. For that lost innocence, that lost sense of endless possibility, those lost paths and lost choices. That time before I had really hurt anyone including myself. So, in general, I simply avoid anything that leads me to ruminate on the choices I made and didn’t make. Which includes listening to The Smashing Pumpkins.

Now, to be clear, this is not about wishing I were living a different life right now. Of course there are things I would change; it must be a rare person who thinks everything in her life is perfect. But all things told, I think I’ve done ok. I am in love with and married to the literal hottest and most wonderful man in the world (ok I may not be entirely objective here, but also it’s just true so there). I have a career that teenage me could never have dreamed of even in her wildest imaginings. That’s not nothing. That is, in fact, a lot.

But even though I don’t wish my path had ended up somewhere else, that doesn’t mean that I don’t wish I had made different choices along the way. It doesn’t mean that I don’t wish I could go back to that time before I made any major mistakes and simply…not make any — even though objectively I know the choices and the mistakes I made were necessary to get me here and had I made different ones I would now be a different person living a different life.

In the end I did buy tickets for the concert — how could I not — but as the date drew near I still hadn’t managed to make myself listen to the pumpkins again. Every time I thought about putting them on I couldn’t face it. I couldn’t face exposing those old scars, feeling those old feelings. It wasn’t until the day of the concert itself that I finally made myself do it — and it was exactly as I’d feared. I still knew all the words, I knew exactly which song played after the last on each album, I knew when a drumbeat would kick in, when Billy would snarl, when the guitar would scream. But the feelings of loss and regret were overpowering and I spent the hours before the concert in a state of angsty melancholy¹. I expected to spend the concert in the same state of mind.

But that was not what happened. At all.

Instead, somehow, seeing them on stage fixed me. Suddenly I wasn't looking back at those years with sadness and regret. I was instead filled with pure delight and fondness and a deep certainty that I didn’t want to be anywhere but right here, at this place and time and the exact age that I am right now, watching this band that had been so important in my youth, up on stage absolutely living their best lives, just as I am in fact living mine. Like me they are older, hopefully wiser, a bit battered and bruised from living a life filled with both good and bad choices — and god knows they made their own (very public) mistakes too. But, I thought as I watched them and screamed my heart out at Zero and Ava Adore and Bullet, while there is a loss of potential as you grow older, there is also a gain in joy.

(…it’s possible you may be able to hear me in this video 😅)

Now, for the younger readers of this newsletter, I don’t mean to suggest that when you are young you don’t experience joy, of course you do. But I reflected as I watched Billy Corgan striding around on the stage, beaming and having an absolute blast, even doing an exuberantly playful cover of Take My Breath Away (and this from a man who was memorably described by his one-time-manager as a “bad-tempered boiled egg”²), one of the great compensations of getting older is realising that not everything is as deadly serious as you once thought it was.

I think it’s fair to say that both the pumpkins and teenage me took ourselves much more seriously back then. But taking yourself extremely seriously is not a feeling that can survive the knocks of life, and so this too is something that I have lost. But for this loss, which came as a direct result of the bad choices and mistakes I made, I do not feel regret. Instead I find myself feeling great gratitude — even a tenderness: for past me, for past them, for our great seriousness and our bad choices and our mistakes and our passion and our hunger for the world and the things we never did and the paths we didn’t take and the lives we didn’t lead and the full stops we never intended. Forgive us, for we did not know what the hell we were doing.

And forgive us, too, for no longer being young. As the great Corgan himself says, “all things must surely have to end,” and that includes your youth. And, yes, that can be sad. But, it turns out, there can be great joy, great tenderness and great freedom in it too.

And Billy: I’ll always wanna go for a ride 🤘

1. Some might say this is in fact the perfect mood in which to listen to the pumpkins and I disagree but I am acknowledging that those people exist even if they are WRONG

2. I can’t find a citation for this online, this is old old lore, but I have remembered it for decades and I am choosing to continue to believe that this was said. If anyone can provide me with a link I would be very grateful!