For a long time, all sorts of benchmarks crowded around my birthdays – things I should've have done, places I should have gone, things I should have figured out. Ways I was falling behind or getting ahead. Adulthood felt like a place with shifting requirements for entry. Somewhere I needed to cross in to and couldn't. A comforting place where things would be more certain and sure. I wished for it mightily.
Without quite knowing how, benchmarks be damned, I've gotten there. It's not how I imagined it would be. A wobblier, but weirdly sturdy way of being. It reminds me somehow of learning to ride a bike, something I don't actually remember. I recall the before and the after: falling and bloody knees, uncertainty and exhilaration. The middle is a mysterious happening.
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Lovely: My friend Abbey's post about childhood as a 'wild and private place' bounded by memory.
