So, I’m 24. Just thought you should know that, since today’s topic is my youth, LOL. Being back in my hometown, the town I left 6 years ago for Los Angeles then Montréal, my age resurges it’s authority (or lack thereof) when I meet up with people I haven’t seen in a long while. Sometimes the relationship goes right back to where it always has been, and other times there’s a vaguenes caused by changes in situation.
I went back to a Chinese New Years event held at the Martial Arts School I used to attend. In my teenage years I was highly involved, a highly social participant and my fellow classmates were like extended family. Family with drama of course, but family none the less. Fast forward to today, and half of those relationships have survived in somewhat truncated and somewhat expanded forms.
The boy I once had the most unrequited love for is now a grown gay man. Apparently I was the catalyst to that admission. (If he couldn’t love me, than he could love no woman, how’s that for flattery?) We are quite close now. The woman who was my senior (and who used to give me terrible advice, btw) and aggressively required more male attention than any woman I have ever met, has retired from the school since she found her SO there. The man who let me ocassionally have my adolescent hormonal way with him remains an indelible friend of mine. The teachers who used to admonish me for my frequent lack of studiousness now hit on me.
And I still feel like I’m 17 years old. It’s a weird feeling to see how others view you change sometimes. I suppose I am grateful that I am now considered an adult standing on my own two feet. When I was 17, I desired that acknowledgment, but at the same time I was glad that I could fade into the background when the drama ensuing my 20 something friends unfurled. Now that I’m the 20 something it is weird, I’d rather not have the attention. At least then I knew my friendships were based upon my personality and merits, why the sudden interest in me now? It’s like I was a tadpole and grew legs and lost the tail. Funny thing is, I think it’s just the age that makes me “hot.” I was full grown and in much better shape physically then.
And although I feel like I’m still 17, I know I am young and am actually waiting with anticipation to meet my thirties. I am surrendering to the intensity of my twenties finally: the knowing and not knowing what I want or need in life. I have to commit the next few years to living without compromise to find out what I want in life and not be lazy, or stay too close to my comfort zone to make my personal discoveries. I look at the next decades as hopefully a time of peace and reconciliation of hopefully knowing what I want and going out to get them. I feel like now, at 24, being young, I have to make a series of possible mistakes to discover all of this, and it is scary.
So, those of you out there reading this who are older, maybe wiser, does this make you want to be younger again and go through this? Did you skip this portion of the pie or are you going through it again. Sigh, I just wonder, because although I feel like time is running out, I still feel inexorably young, and a bit clumsy. Just a thought.
