There is no final version of yourself
At some point, growing up became confused with arriving. You finished school, found work, acquired a home if you were lucky, accumulated responsibilities and gradually became the person you were apparently meant to be. Change belonged to youth. By middle age, the expectation was that the important decisions had already been made. Even the language reflects it: we talk about people being settled, established, mature. As if adulthood were somewhere you eventually park yourself.
Yulan & Blaise’s new single ‘Growing Pains’ starts from a much less comfortable proposition: what if the growing never stops? Yulan describes the irony of experiencing growing pains as an adult, of offering yourself and your spiralling thoughts to the sea. More interestingly, she talks about resisting the temptation to let life “calcify”, and about the need for play and chaotic release. Calcification is probably a better description of conventional adulthood than growing up. You stop doing things you are bad at. You become protective of the identity you have constructed. You learn what clothes are you, what people are you, what places are you. Eventually even curiosity can start to feel faintly inappropriate.
Water is everywhere in Yulan & Blaise’s story, which makes the metaphor difficult to ignore. Yulan spent part of her adolescence living on a catamaran off the Australian coast, while Blaise grew up freediving in San Diego. Their explanation for returning to that experience is beautifully physical: a large wave makes it difficult to remain trapped inside your own thoughts. There is something almost embarrassingly simple about that proposition in an age obsessed with optimising the mind. Sometimes you do not need another system for understanding yourself. Sometimes you need cold water in your face.
Perhaps that is why play becomes more interesting, rather than less, as we get older. Children constantly destabilise themselves. They invent identities, abandon them, learn things badly, fall over, get wet, become obsessed with something for three weeks and then forget it existed. Adults become specialists in avoiding precisely those situations. We optimise away embarrassment and uncertainty. Yulan & Blaise seem unusually comfortable with the opposite impulse. They met while performing at MONA in Tasmania, and their respective histories move across acting, film, performance and music rather than settling obediently into a single discipline.
There is a lovely material detail buried inside ‘Growing Pains’. The duo sampled tiny shells collected from the shores of Lutruwita/Tasmania, where they live, placing something found on a beach inside an explicitly synthetic process. The original idea for the song was similarly unstable: a lullaby-like voice note that somehow ended up somewhere entirely different. Perhaps the most dangerous thing about becoming an adult is not getting older. It is becoming too good at recognising yourself.