Life is weird.
One day you're a kid and you think grownups know everything and you ask them questions so that you can try to understand the world and your place in it and they tell you things and you believe them.
And then the next day you're a teenager and you don't really ask them questions anymore because you've realized that your parents can't help you with your trigonometry homework, so maybe they don't know everything after all.
And then the day after that you're almost
finished university and you're (calmly) freaking out (you're a Libra, after
all) because you have no idea what you're supposed to do with your life, so you
get a couple of part-time jobs, and it takes you a couple more days or years to
realize that you definitely do not want to spend the rest of your life taking
orders from people who just blindly follow their own orders without asking
questions and who punish you when you do ask questions.
So you start helping kids and teenagers
when they have questions about things (grammar and boys and parental pressure and,
more often than you'd think, about how they feel like no one can really answer
the questions that are the most important to them, like how they don't know
what to do with the rest of their lives and how they feel like they don’t fit
in) and you answer as honestly as you can and you always admit when you don't
know the answer to something because part of being a grownup is realizing that
grownups are just kids with a few more years under their belts and that they
are just fumbling through their lives wondering what the hell happened and how
did I get here.
And then the next day you are 40 years old
and you know now that you were wrong when you were a kid and you thought that
grownups and old people were in some fundamental way different from you.
Because now you are grownups and old
people, but you are also the kid and the teenager, and you always will be all
of those parts and isn’t it amazing and scary and wild.
And you realize that one day you won’t be
anything at all, or maybe you’ll still be something but it definitely won’t be this something, this
kid/teenager/grownup/old person in this body with its scars and its questions.
So you take a moment to appreciate all the moments
that have brought you to this point in time and space, and you think of all the
people and places and experiences that have helped you understand the world and
your place in it. And you are grateful, even though turning 40 fucking sucks.
