Almost-Grown Up

Life goes by in a breeze. I blink, I'm in the third year of College. Exhale, already halfway through the first semester of Wesleyan. Time to pick classes again. A day goes by and I am now 18, finally an adult. I turn around, High School years lay behind me, so distant the memories seem as if they belong to a past life, surely not my own. I'm not old - I'm very young. But all of the things that were once so familiar have changed, and the differences make me feel as if I've been alive a hundred years. People have changed, left my life, gone off in their own direction. Home is no longer the place where I lay my head down at night, but instead now a place where I can only visit precious few times each year. I don't know where I'm going to Grad School, I don't know where I want to live where I grow up, paper towels are a luxury I haven't had since leaving home, and I miss my mom taking me out to go shopping.

I am an "almost-grown up".

I love it; I like feeling responsible, getting errands done, seeing things get accomplished. I like it when people don't treat me like a child, but instead like someone who matters. (Despite the baby face - sigh.) I'm at a time in my life where one part of the day I can act grown-up, and yet act like a complete child on certain occasions...sometimes merely hours later. There's college for you.

But then... sometimes... I don't like it so much. I feel a little homesick for my old life. Sometimes I miss Orlando - while so many times I hated that busy, hectic place, I realize that all my life I had grown used to it. Now the absence seems as strange and apparent as absolute silence. Which is, literally, just what the transition has been like - stepping from a room full of people into a completely quite one. The busy-ness, the rhythm, the life that my hometown possessed - makes so many places seem like ghost towns in comparison. I'm not used to seeing tiny Southern towns, driving down 20-mile highways through the middle of nowhere, not a strip mall in sight. The only place I had ever really experienced something like that before was Live Oak, a little town north of Gainesville where my grandparents live. Orlando was my city, my home, and there is no other place on Earth quite like it. It was familiar, and I miss familiar. I miss being around family and the people I know, going to all the familiar stores and restaurants, being privy to all of the exciting perks and things that only the inhabitants of one of the busiest cities in Florida got to enjoy.

And my, since moving I have aged. It's not necessarily a readily apparent thing - but I notice little changes, differences in the way I act, the way I think. There are things that make me shake my head now - like going to the store and seeing moms and their teen daughters shopping for clothes, and those girls just being so rude to their moms. I know I was like that at some point - I went through that phase - but really? What ever possessed me to do that? It just makes me want to tell them to shape up and stop taking their moms for granted. I was a terribly rude teenager, but I realize how silly that was now. My mom always made sure I had nice clothes, I had good food, that I was taken care of. Heck, she even endured teaching me algebra - a task that no mortal should take lightly. I realize how lucky I was, how patient and caring my mom was all those years, and I just wish I would have acted more grateful to her for everything she'd done for me... not be the moody, smart-butt teenager that I see in almost every store I walk in now.

The bottom line is, being an almost-grown up is hard. It's exhausting. It's worrisome. Trying to make my business work, getting all of my own shows and bookings, fighting for every customer, that's hard. Paying for all of my own things, budgeting carefully, takes self control - and many times I make sacrifices and go without a lot of things, like expensive low-carb ice cream and nice makeup and eating out. Making new friends, finding new places, that's foreign and discouraging at times - I feel as if I'm still trying to find in Macon, in Georgia, a place that feels like Orlando - but I know I'll never find it. And, you know, just by writing that I realize all this time that that's exactly what I have been trying to do - I've been taking pieces of my old life and holding them up against the new, trying to compare the two, trying to find similarities between two entirely different things. I try so hard, but I have to come to terms with the fact that those similarities I search so hard for will never be found. Everything I have ever known has changed, and that means I have to make changes, too. I can't keep searching for remnants of my old life in my new one. That doesn't mean I have to let go of Florida, becoming a complete hermit to my friends and family back home. That's always going to be a part of me that I will embrace with open arms every chance I get. But it does mean I have to also embrace new things, accept that my life from now on will involve more responsibility, and learn from all of the new lessons that life is bound to toss at me.

I know that from this blog I might come off as seeming discontent - this is not the case. I realize that these feelings are normal, that in time I will come to adjust. It's just... learning to be an adult is hard! I love college and finally being close to Joshua and meeting new people and (albeit slowly) becoming more educated. I love knowing that in a few short years, my hard work will pay off, and I will be able to put my college degree to good use. Until then, I guess you could say I have a homework assignment that has nothing to do with college classes -

That is, finding my "new normal".