A Growing Journey

One thing that can happen when transitioning into full on adulthood is really learning who you are as a person. When you were a teenager, maybe you were beginning to see who you were. In college, you got to see yourself as an independent person while you had no curfew, partied whenever you wanted, skipped a few classes, became a feminist and a democrat, and maybe experimented with all sorts of things from drugs, to sex, to deciding if you wanted to go Greek.  And when all the chaos of being on your own starts to settle in, that is when who you were always meant to be starts to develop. As time goes by, you grow out of those experiments and learn to narrow down what exactly it is you want from life and what you are going to do in order to make it happen.

    I could keep going with the list of what happens mentally as we progress in our lives, but I can’t go much further into the future because this is about where I’m at. I’ve learned so much about myself through the process of growing up in all stages and I know I have much more to do. The prospect of growing even deeper into who I am supposed to be absolutely thrills me. However, there are always fears that I won’t live up to who I want my future self to be. Then again, this is a price we pay for growing up. There is no fast forward or rewind, as we all wish there were. But wouldn’t it be a fantastic discovery if we learned how to replay our greatest hits in life whenever we wanted? Since this hasn’t been discovered yet, we as mere mortals must always live in the present, never able to return to the past and never really certain of what the future might hold for us.

    The truth is, I’m not where I want to be in life yet, but wanting everything to be here now is just a side-effect of being young. I want to be able to skip ahead to all the good stuff, but I know I need to remember to enjoy all the little things and the good things I have now. For instance, I’d say getting my first car this week was a step in the right direction. I am so in love with it and it is just one step closer to the rest of my life. Although there are bigger goals in my mind’s eye, those are for another day and today has its own agenda. There is still so much of myself I have yet to discover, and as I continue the process of being an adult, I have to remember that the journey makes the destination, not the other way around.