Growing Up: a post that isn't about the kitten I found.

I am growing up and it terrifies me.

Numbers I get, numbers I have been counting for all of my life.  I understand that 25 is equidistant from 20 and 30.  But what I wasn’t expecting was how different they are and that 25 is being caught in the growing pains of wanting a totally different life.  

I am more limited now.  I am aware that the choices I make will be the stories I tell.  I have less potential energy.  I won’t be a surgeon, an astronaut, a linguistics major, or a scientist.  I have made decisions that lead me to a path so deep in the woods of life that I can’t navigate my way back.  And the forward forest is of fewer roads than I had seen before. 

Now don’t get me wrong, I still want to act and make art that gives people hope in being alive, that is the ethos of who I am… but I’m still not doing it.  Not enough at least.  It is not what pays my bills, it’s not all that I do.  So I could make that my focus, and really do more each week to take advantage of this great city I am in; but I also want to travel and have enjoyed uprooting myself each year and starting over with a new piece of myself that I had gained.

So that is the 20 year old in me.  Wanting everything and trusting it’ll work out.

Now the 30 year old…is who confuses me.  The 30 year old hears this and worries about health insurance, affording rent, knowing that I can make rent the following month, and longs for…dare I say it…stability.

I am someone that warns my friends when I meet them that I at some point will leave, eventually to France, and will do so happily.  And yet now I’m sad that I don’t come home to someone I have known for years.  Or that I don’t have enough spots where I am a regular.  Or that I have twenty different addresses saved in Grubhub/Seamless/Amazon.

I don’t want to settle down, there is still so much I want to do…but I also am longing to have a staycation where I get to really relax at home.  It confuses and overwhelms me to want so many different versions of the same story.  I just hope I land on one worth telling.