Growing Up

So I know I've been talking about my upcoming birthday for like.... 7 months or something. It feels like a big deal that I'm turning 25, not because it seems old, but because 25 seems really... adult. At 22, 23, even 24 you can sort of get away with being just out of college and not a real adult. At 25 you're like a legitimate adult. Its the age my aunts told us that we had to be before we got married, which means that they assumed we would be mature and responsible enough to handle adult life by that point.

A lot of the time I feel like I am just pretending to be an adult (and I don't even pretend all that well most of the time). And then of course, what is the incentive to grow up and act like an adult? I live at home with my parents. I work at the church where I spent my teenage years (and thus many people still think of me as a teenager). I spend significant amounts of time hanging out with teenagers or on a college campus. I work at camp during the summer. It occurs to me that in this life situation, I may never actually grow up.

There is a whole list of things that I thought I would do, or wanted to do by 25, and I haven't done a lot of those things yet. I'm not really sure where I'm going or where I want to go, and I think that's why I've been feeling all weird and directionless lately. Its like my heart is trying to give birth to a 25-year-old life and its taking a long time.

And just as I was thinking about all of this, I looked in the mirror and found a gray hair.