Adolescence
Tuesday - 03.02.21 - 11:02PM
It’s already March and it feels like everything is moving faster than I can keep up with, even though all my evenings have been steady and quiet and slow. This winter passed by in the blink of an eye and I wonder if it warrants a closer look at global warming. My mom says the city had a string of similarly mild winters around 1996-1997, and I think about how nice it must’ve been, playing outside in the snow (was there snow?) and not freezing to death.
“Don’t you remember?” she asks. It’s late and we’re standing in the kitchen.
Of course I don’t remember - I would’ve been only 3 or 4 years old.
Sometimes I wish I could go back - do my life over again and make better choices. A couple of weekends ago, I spent hours rereading my old journals and remembering my turbulent and painful adolescence. It’s always jarring to revisit the specific kinds of pain I went through when I was around fifteen and lost in the world, full of particularly lonely doubts and insecurities. Everything was tense and heavy then. I was walking through molasses, all wound up, just waiting for the next piece of my life to slip and cause everything to come tumbling down, over and over and over again.
It’s so easy to take my current confidence and self-assuredness for granted. I wake up every day being okay with myself and loving myself, not having to remember the painful process of choosing to do so, and I’m grateful for that. I’m grateful that I’m in a better place now
I reread my old journals and so much of them are just a cry for help. The lines are soaked in desperation - a searching for some sense of freedom and comfort - freedom from the doom of being inherently wrong, and comfort in being assured that I was okay, and that I was enough just the way I was. It’s so strange to remember that at some point, I had a full on crisis of faith, believing that I was damned simply for who I might love.
I’m thankful now that I’m in a place where I can love boundlessly and fearlessly and know that only good can come of it. Yes, maybe I would’ve done some things differently in my youth - if I could go back, I would tell myself to stop skipping so much school, tell myself there’s no need to wander or escape, that everything I was looking for was already right there - but at least out of that experience came my absolute self-acceptance.
I struggled and I hurt and eventually I had to face myself and choose to love myself just as I was - choose to live and to love, and not cower in fears cast by doubt and uncertainty - and after I made that decision, nobody could take it away from me.
