Decade #2.

Welcome back. I know that you are just dying to jump right into the next decade. Right? I was too. Because I was ten. Do you remember being ten? It’s a little while ago for me but I remember a few things pretty distinctly and my raging desire to catapult into teenage years was one of them. I wanted ALL OF IT. I wanted ear piercings and Wet ‘N’ Wild frosted pink lip gloss. I wanted to drive. I wanted to watch PG-13 rated movies. I wanted to walk around the flea market with my friends unaccompanied by adults. Ironically boys were pretty low on my list (I was MUCH smarter back then). But autonomy? Freedom? Independence? I craved those bits like a wanderer seeks water in the desert.

And also, I felt ready. Ready to grow up. Ready to take on the world.

What a fucking joke. I couldn’t have been less ready for any of it. Not even humanly possible. I was terrified. I was scared in a way that was multi-dimensional. Known and unknown. I experienced the kind of fear that is internalized and deeply hidden when facing certain obstacles and new challenges. And then, I keenly felt the loud, very-obvious-to-everyone kind of terror in other scenarios. You know what’s even crazier? The change just kept on comin’. The years between ten and twenty were a whirling tornado. Puberty, braces, graduations, first relationships, fights, laughter, bad relationships, old friendships, new friendships, and hopeless friendships. I lost and found myself a trillion times during that decade and I was too young to understand the gravity of that process or the consequences.

Even at the close of my ten to twenty span, I was hopelessly naïve. I saw the best in people and things. My disappointment didn’t lead to resignation, it led to perseverance. I wasn’t tired or burnt out. I was confused, frustrated, and endlessly persistent.

I experienced real travel and physical intimacy for the first time. I found my own hobbies that weren’t suggested to me by a parental figure. I explored the idea that we don’t have to like people, even when they are related to us. I embraced the idea that not liking someone should immediately result in guilt and repentance. I liked my face and my body and hated my face and my body and faux accepted my face and my body. I drank and tried drugs. I said things I didn’t mean and felt things I didn’t say. I learned how to shrink myself to fit in and then I learned how to break free of the crowd.

I was most comfortable eating pb&j and vanilla yogurt every damn day for many of those ten years. And then somehow, I awoke one day, having become a person with an eclectic palate. I wanted to try ALL the food.

I read anything I could get my hands on (still do), but my taste in literature fluctuated and varied and expanded.

I was a baby and then suddenly, I was watching other people’s babies. I was a visual specialist (window dresser), a clothing folder, a stylist, a waitress, a pharmacy worker, an art gallery assistant, and an art teacher. I drank coffee, made coffee, and sold coffee.

I learned that the world was far scarier than I ever gave it credit for, and it became incrementally scarier with each year that passed. Also, it become infinitely more magical.

I started to understand what it meant to attract people who are a reflection of how you feel about yourself (meh). I started to be the woman I never thought I would be in some respects and who I had always hoped to be, in others.  

I was liked, loved, rejected, betrayed, graded, entrusted, encouraged, and embattled.

I lived with roommates and then I lived alone. One thing is clear as day for me because I still experience it to this day, twenty years later. Eighteen years of age, and I would wake up in my Washington D.C. apartment and look around; marveling that what surrounded me was mine. Well, rented and someone else’s, but also, mine. I was “grown up”. I was responsible for taking care of me. This made me feel simultaneously powerful and absolutely gutted. I felt that very feeling anew each morning. I thought: “This is MY life. This is MY space. These are MY responsibilities.”

That decade was the first time I took ownership and I never looked back. This is, in some measure, why I have suffered so grievously over the years. I have always subscribed to an almost ruthless accountability (see above, and then add- this is MY fault). It became apparent during my teenage and pre-adult years that I was responsible for writing my own script. I also had a keen understanding that the universe would dip down from time to time and rip out a few rando pages and leave me scrambling to figure out what the fuck to do next. Controlled insanity. This thought didn’t scare me. It doesn’t scare me. I can roll with the punches better than most. It wasn’t the pain I endured that set me up. It was the disappointment in my fellow humans. It was my unrealistic expectation that even when the world was fucked, people would see it as I did, and we would all lift each other up. Poor babe.

The thing is, I HAD to be that person. I did. I couldn’t have gotten to be THIS person, had I not been that person. I had to be torn into a million pieces to be glued back together just like THIS.

I had to wear a men’s tie for school pictures, have unrequited crushes, square dance with Jerry who chewed tin foil, go AWAY to school, leave my childhood friends physically and the emotionally, fall off my bike, have my hair “turn” curly, and fall for the sweet talker on the LIRR. I had to go through all the things as a child. I was indeed a child who thought she was an adult. I had to do that and be that before I could do all of this and be THIS person.

It’s easy to judge what I would go through in later decades.  What a waste. Or, what an obvious representation of all the lessons I hadn’t learned. But, nah. For me, it’s a natural progression. A slow churn towards a complete cluster fuck. A fascinating and fun trip towards implosion. I had to do it all and feel it all to realize I didn’t know it all. In fact, I knew nearly nothing at all.

What DO I know? I was able to be a child for longer than we allow kids today. A real kid. I wasn’t looking to hook up or get crazy. I just wanted to see a sliver more. Just a teensy bitsy bit. I wanted to spread my wings just enough to start to get to know the person I was becoming [without completely losing sight of where I came from]. I just didn’t realize that once you get going, there’s no stopping that train. I had no choice but to grow up, and so…grow up I did.

Sometimes we just have to embrace the out-of-control-ness of it all.

Speaking of growing up (kinda, sorta, maybe) and being out of control, we are going to celebrate hump day by discussing my 20s. God bless. What a giant clusterfuck.

Talk soon.

L.