Another year, another etc...
I turn twenty tomorrow. Twenty seemed pretty huge just a few short years ago, much bigger than 18 or 19. I'm usually disappointed by birthdays, but the more I think about it, this one may not be such a big letdown. I'm no adult and I don't have everything (or even anything) about where I'm headed figured out, but I have grown.
I understood myself pretty well at 17- much better than most. Though, in retrospect, I was something of a big fish in a little (reall, quite small) sea, I was aware of my motives, in control of my actions and I had a good thing going. I was a pretty charismatic fellow in those times and did pretty much whatever I liked because, for some reason, people would accept it. Despite my arrogance and a general ignorance of the much greater world, as a closed unit, I understood myself.
Then came Pittsburgh, just a couple of months after I turned 18...
I was torn from my comfort zone and forced to confront that greater world where I was not universally understood or liked. Yes, some of it was the apathetic classmates, groupthink mentality and the depressing landscape, but a lot of the reason that I hated Pittsburgh so much was that I refused to revise my conception of myself and my expectations about the world.
I kept hoping that, when I came back to Chatham, I would find myself back in my comfort zone, but it had changed and so had I. I spent a summer in limbo, still refusing to accept that I'd changed. It would be easy to say that I sort of fell into a depression at this point, but more accurately, I became extremely stressed. It's pretty stressful to wake up every morning and spend all day trying to force your square-peg life into a round hole. I was nervous. I couldn't really stand social interactions and I withdrew a lot during my first semester at NYU.
But round about Thanksgiving, something changed. I sat down and reflected- something that, besides a few episodes at Quaker Meeting, I'd avoided for over a year. A lot of what I saw appeared on its surface to be pretty bad- isolating myself, withdrawing in large-scale social situations, using a lot more drugs than I used to etc...
What it all came down to was distance. I was distancing myself from everything, including my loved ones and reality in general (we'll not get into what I think about reality because this is long enough as is). The next few months were not just about "fixing" these things, but also coming to terms with them and realizing that they weren't all bad.
The last few months have been some of the best of my life. Though they haven't been as chock-full of fun, lasting memories as some of those that occured between 17 and 18, I've learned a lot about myself and regained a comfort zone that I believe is much more flexible (that is, less tied to a specific place and set of people) than the one that I had established in earlier times.
As much as I'm not the adult that I expected myself to magically become upon turning twenty, I think that I've done more than enough growing for one year and, while I still have no fucking clue what I'm going to do with my life, I'm okay with that, which is much more than most people can say.