I have decided it is imperative to enjoy this age that I am. To enjoy being eighteen and in college and enjoy living with my parents and sissy and even the bad stuff, like my cruddy emotions. Okay, maybe I won’t enjoy all of it, but I at least want to live all of it and not be so eager to get to the next stage in life even when everyone else is.
Partly this is because I feel like I skipped a couple years there, like I didn’t really get the full teenage experience, and not because I was trying to grow up too fast or anything, but just because for so long my life was dominated by stuff like doctor visits and surgeries and health concerns. Stuff that should be foreign to a sixth and seventh grade girl. I feel like because of all that was going on I sort of skipped that time in my life. It was like I got off the Life Train at eleven, when I and everyone around me was still pretty firmly in childhood, then tried to get back on at thirteen when everyone around me was in teenagehood and I had no idea what or where I was supposed to be.
And it was like I’d skipped two years, two important years that everyone got to live but me. And, no, I’m not feeling sorry for myself here, I’m just saying that I think I shouldn’t be so eager to rush ahead right now, I think I kind of owe it to myself to just be eighteen and be able to live the age that I am and be typical for once.
I don’t think I’ve ever really been a typical age. I feel like even before all the huge stuff happened in junior high, I was always dealing with that stuff, health concerns that were way too advanced for me. Like missing so much of kindergarten because of being in and out of the hospital and being sick so much, and all the other years always being that girl who couldn’t run.
Childhood is full of running and I did very little of it. Just today I ran to my car (parked in a guest parking) to get something out of it and I could still remember how I used to not be able to do that. Just going upstairs would leave me out of breath, and I was ten years old.
And now that stuff isn’t so important. I’m not The Girl Who Can’t Run or The Girl With The Heart Problem anymore, mostly because I don’t like to tell people about it. And even when I do tell them, most people don’t really get it. So to everyone else that isn’t really a part of my life anymore and finally people get to see me as normal. Or, you know, relatively so. Which is nice, but not really my point. My point is that right now I don’t want anything else but to be the age that I am. Things tend to happen for me just like they do for everyone else, they just happen later and I’m tired of feeling like that’s some fault of mine, like if I just tried harder I could catch up.
I can’t catch up. I’m not even sure if I want to. Maybe those two years put me behind or maybe it’s just because I am a late bloomer in the game of life, but whatever it is, I don’t really care. People around me are getting engaged, getting married, getting apartments with their friends, being all adult, but I can’t handle that yet. I’m just not ready. It will happen when it happens for me and when those things do happen, whenever that is, I know it will be the right time.