Adult in Training

Everyone’s been through the old photo albums, full of all the pictures your mom took of you when you were little.  Some would call them embarrassing.  Others – myself included – would say that they are, with few exceptions, the only good photos that have been taken of me.  Being un-photogenic is a curse, I don’t care what anyone says. 

After I turned seven and stopped being cute just by being alive, the number of pictures of me (and to be fair, of my brother as well) significantly drops. There aren’t really that many of me when I was in high school, and I think the only ones of me in college are when I was drunk, and at my graduation.  So maybe when I look back on those times, my memory is clouded and jaded, without the benefit of actual proof, but sometimes I think that I was the best version of myself when I was in high school.

I wouldn’t have believed it then.  When I was in high school, I couldn’t wait to get out.  Out of school, out of my house, out of the country.  I just wanted to leave, because I felt like I was missing out on life.  Missng out on something big, that thing that makes life interesting. Now, looking back, it feels like the only thing I was missing was being jaded.

Maybe it’s just because I’ve been in a bit of a funk, on and off since I came back from school, but in the five or six years that I’ve been out of high school, I can’t really point to very many things that are better now than they were then.  I’ve gotten older and a little bit wiser, but all those lessons came tough, and I worry that perhaps they came at the expense of my optimism. 

There’s  no doubt that I’ve changed since high school.  And I’m not sure if the person I was in high school could have survived the “real world” – not to be confused with “The Real World”.  But instead of that fact comforting me, it sort of just makes me sad.  Could I really not have survived, without an outlook that now feels bitter and jaded? 

I miss my high-school-self.  I miss the feeling that the world is just waiting for me to discover it, instead of feeling like the world is waiting to eat me alive. I miss knowing that friends will always be there for you, instead of holding them at arm’s length and waiting for them to leave.  I miss trying to figure out who I am and what I can do, instead of realizing  that the person I am is not the person I thought I would be when I imagined myself five years after high school.