I’ve spent most of my life chasing the person I want to be. Because 18-year-old me will have better friends, and 20-year-old me will land a killer job, and 25-year-old me will be madly in love. And me 6 months from now will be skinnier, and me a year from now will be more confident, and me some time from now will be better somehow.
For years, this is what I thought. That if I could just wait it out, everything would get better. The nights waiting as you sit on your twin bed where you’ve written your entire novel, a dozen empty coffee mugs still dirty on the nightstand and screaming until your lungs burn. It took me a long time to realize that life doesn’t work that way. Older doesn’t mean happier or easier, and it certainly doesn’t mean better; it just means older. Life isn’t a well plotted screen play, or a checklist, or a waiting room. Life isn’t about growing up to be all that we’ve ever wanted; it’s just about growing. It’s about love, and change, and crying yourself to sleep when it’s all too much. And working a crappy job, and kissing your best friend even though they might not like you back, and calling your mom all the time because you miss her. Its fights, and promotions, and hospital visits. Its school and the start of jobs, and the end of friendships and relationships. And then it’s another wedding of another college friend, the fourth one this year, but this time you meet a guy who’s just as down for love as you and you dance all night. And then it’s this: he cries when you say “I do.” And then you have a kid with your eyes and his dorky ears.
It’s all of these things, and bad things, and good things, and the raw realization that it doesn’t get better or worse, it just gets different. It always changes. And somehow that makes it more wonderful. Because future you may have the friends, and the boy, and the job, but she didn’t get it by waiting around. She is a product of you, right now, tomorrow, changing and growing every moment that follows. She worries too often about what people think of her. She still doesn’t have it together. And maybe that’s what I’ve learned after all this time: nobody has it together. We’re all just here, floundering around in pursuit of being something more. Broken, thoughtful creatures with too much time on our hands, desperate for the companionship of someone who reminds us that we are not alone. We don’t have much of anything figured out. Maybe we never will. But more importantly, I think that’s how it’s supposed to be.