Birthday #2
Birthday #2
Aging is such a hard concept to get your head around. The world moves, and sometimes it’s easy to forget that you do too, in ways that are impossible to see or fully understand. You blink and suddenly two, three years ago was years ago, and that means you must have changed, but that still feels like you so you can’t really figure out how.
For the first time, I truly feel like I’m starting to age — I’m closer to being an adult than a kid, now, and I don’t know what to do with it. It's something foreign I’m not sure how to deal with, the overhanging feeling that I’m too young for the number of years I've lived, instead of too old. I don’t know what I’m doing. I don't know what to say or write or do. I don’t know where I’m going. I don’t know who the hell I am. And yet, we all age another day, another year passes, and we’re all still here. The birds still sing, the rains still come.
I think the thing I’ve begun to truly realize is that no one does. No one has any idea where they are, especially at my age, in this crazy, horrible world we live in. Or in five years. In ten. There’s no time where a year will pass and you will suddenly be totally happy and sure of yourself, and everything. There are very few days where you will feel completely satisfied with the time given. The lack of surety as you get older is something you learn about in books and stories, but you can never really understand the feeling until you experience it — there’s always the impression that something will click and you’ll just know … what you’re doing. Maybe this is what growing into being an adult is — feeling more like a child than you ever have, even when you were one.
High school feels to be taking up a much bigger place in my life and my future than it seems like it should, especially for a place I've already spent a year at. It aggravates everything, and yet I can’t imagine wishing these next years away, for fear of blinking and missing something important. Maybe, eventually, I’ll find a way to leave.
For now, I’ll go back to doing my homework. Keep doing whatever it is I'm doing, tell myself it doesn’t have to be perfect, because it can’t be. Try to savor the time I have now, to fill it with meaningful things. Consider it all a gift to myself.
Decade and a half, wow.
Happy birthday to me.
The Voice
October 2024
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