Vintage 1977

In a few short hours, I will be 33.

I'm honestly just not sure how that happened. I mean it. I remember turning 30, and everything since has been a blur. Three years of smashed together memories. Three years--every day I realize more and more why my mother couldn't ever remember specifics about when in our lives something happened. At a certain point, all the memories become snapshots. They no longer exist on a timeline. They exist in a box. They are jumbled and tossed together, shuffled completely with all the other events that became significant for whatever reason, perhaps none at all. And, in my new found maturity, I'm finding that I like that. I like it a lot. I don't want an chronologically organized album of my life, I want an old shoebox full of junk that only makes sense to me. I want baby pictures next to graduation programs. In short, I'm embracing the chaos. Every body take deep breaths.

So. Thirty-three. I'll be honest, I'm expecting a lot of the coming year. Some of it is out of my hands, and other expectations are all up to me. I've been working harder in the past few years than I ever expected, harder than I knew I was capable of working. Not just professionally, though leaping from a comfortable and safe home office of 10 years and into the unknown hasn't been easy. I don't always love my job, and I'm often disappointed. Beyond that, I've had to learn how to work on my marriage--even the most wonderful and perfect marriage, which is what I feel like I have, requires a daily effort, some times even more than I think can give. My family is getting older, and I'm constantly having to figure out how to handle the consequences of growing up, and what that means for the people in my extended universe, and my relationships with them. I've had to learn more about myself, what I want, and what makes me happy. And every. single. day. I have to push myself to do the things that I know are best for me, for my health, and for my happiness.
Being a grown up is freakin' DIFFICULT, y'all.

So, yeah, in some ways I still feel, like we all do, that I'm a child, masquerading as an adult. But, in so many others, I'm thankful for the wisdom and the peace that I gain with every trip around the sun. I'm also really tired. Add that to the growing list of things I now understand more about my mother--why she was always on the look out for a nap or opportunity to soak in a tub. Anyway, that's about all the birthday-reflectiveness I can muster this year--just know that, as the day passes, as every day passes, I'm working towards my goal of figuring out just who the hell I am. It's a lot of time to spend in your own head, there's all kinds of crazy goin' on up in here. Which is why, at least for the next couple of months, I'm gonna spend plenty of time out in the yard, too. The simplicity of growing things in dirt is a nice change of pace ;)