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Place in This World

Maybe I've been spending too much time with early teenagers lately, but I've had a lot of thoughts rumbling through my head lately that sound way too much like my journal from 1990. When you're in the middle of that teenage angst, there's always any number of adults around telling you that it will all make sense one day. That eventually you will be at peace with yourself. That "this, too, will pass".

And they do. I see now from my vantage point of 31 (Wow...31? Really?) that perspective comes only with experience. I wrote in my journal the other day that sometimes I want to "crawl into my 12 year old skin". It's not that I really want to live through those days again. It's just that I miss the simplicity of knowing my daily goal was to learn how to solve equations and the gross domestic product of Brazil, to write some notes to friends, to watch my favorite t.v. shows, and go to sleep knowing that my life was just one great big bundle of possibilities.

I miss the possibilities. They've been long buried under bills to pay and dishes to wash and relationships to mend. I feel sometimes like I'm just duct taped together, trying to make it through one more 24 hour period.

At 12, I could be anything I wanted to be. At 31, I can't be anything. I'm too old and too married to be a Cosmo girl. I'm too kidless to be part of the trendy, family crowd. I'm too young to be eccentric. I'm too broke to completely follow my heart. This is a worse "tween" feeling than those precarious teenage years.

I guess I'd really hoped I'd have found my place in this world by now. I thought I'd be a mom and a wife and a writer. Instead, I feel stuck and stagnant, caught between the winds of desperation and fear. My head is rumbling. My heart is beating. My soul is blank.

And I just don't know.

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Christy said…
A. You're never too old to be eccentric. In fact, I think *those* possibilities increase with age
B. I know what you mean. Even with kids, I'm not part of the family crowd. It's weird to still not fit in anywhere. To still not know what I'm going to be
5:50 PM
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