So I'm Older...When Does the Wise Happen?

            So I’ve been gone for about six months now (hopefully I did the math right), but if you are expecting this to suddenly become a blog about a mature human being with a handle on her life and her rapidly changing emotional states, you are going to be sorely disappointed.  But, I mean, let’s be real, that would be a far less interesting blog. Nobody wants to hear about other people’s happiness, all that does is remind you how suckish your life is.

            Okay, so that may not be entirely fair to those of you who may actually have some of your life figured out, but I can’t help but feel a bit of misplaced anger towards those happy few. I mean, I recently turned 20 (woohoo – not!) and although that may not be considered old for most, that is a BIG DEAL! Sure, I’m not about to be shipped off to the nursing home (although a college dorm is a similar experience of mostly out of it people who whine about losing contact with the friends they used to spend time with) but I’m not exactly playing in the sandbox either.

            Here’s the thing about turning 20. In actuality, I have basically my entire life ahead of me. You know, I’m still in school, not yet living on my own and having to find a way to pay my own way, blah blah blah. But that’s really the kind of answer you get from parents and grandparents and other “old” people because they are just wistfully wishing they had the same opportunity to be at the start of something.

           But seriously?! Come on, do they even remember how freaking hard it is to get something started? Sure, 20 means we're at the onset of starting our lives, but that’s just it, we’re at the onset, we’re supposed to be poised to start something, at the gate and just waiting for the gun to go off so we can start our dash toward the finish line. But what happens when you aren’t ready at 20, huh? What happens when you reach 20 and you’re like “Holy Shit! I’m already freaking 20 and I am nowhere NEAR where I thought I would be by the time I got to 20”?

            People always say “As you get older you get wiser” Now, no offense to the people that always say that, but that is absolutely ridiculous. The only thing that happens as you get older is that you realize how few of your goals you’ve actually fulfilled and how completely unprepared you are to continue to grow older. I mean, we all are going to age, that’s the way that life works, but growing wiser, well, that’s really a choice that we each need to make.

Having more experiences doesn’t necessarily make you better prepared to handle those same experiences. Hell, I sometimes feel like I’m constantly repeating the same situations with the exact same results. Sure, afterwards I can recognize what the hell was going, in fact most of the time I can recognize it during, but choosing to act differently isn’t just a matter of understanding how your screwing it up, it’s also about being willing and able to make an actual change.

Being older doesn’t mean that you are wiser, it just means that you’ve had more opportunities to make the choice to change and (a lot of the time) that just means you’ve had more opportunities to make the same mistakes.

                               XOXO
                                       E