Growing up.

Lately I've been thinking about how I'm 24 years old and how that seems quite bizarre to me.

When I was in high school I thought 24-year-olds (or almost any twenty-something, I guess) carried themselves with a sense of maturity while simultaneously pull off being cool and fun.  I thought they could be as proper as the Old English could be during tea time.  And I thought they gushed with wisdom in such a way that they seemed to have life pretty much all figured out.   

Boy, was I sure wrong about this 24-year-old.

I still feel like I'm 17 and still have nothing figured out.  There's this sense of naivete I can't seem to shake off.  I sometimes feel like I live under a rock even though I thought I got out from under it.  Maybe I'm scared to be exposed to the elements.  I don't want to leave my ideals behind to make space for cynicism and jaded attitudes. 

But I'm beginning to feel these elements brush alongside of me this year.

Prior to moving to Rochester, I had never really experienced any personal encounters with racist remarks.  Before this year I could've told maybe just one story from middle school that I wasn't even offended by because I didn't really understand it.  But from this year I could probably tell you about at least 5 different incidents.  They each evoked a different level of emotion, but now they more so just stand out in my mind rather than seem to weigh me down.  At the same time, there are instances I hear about or witness that I feel like I should feel offended about but am not.  Try that on for size.  Still a very confused Asian American as ever.

Death nowadays seems to weigh heavier in my heart.  The two closest people to me who passed away were my grandfather and my favorite teacher, Mrs. Hamilton, who taught me in the 4th grade.  And when they passed away, I was in middle school and it didn't really sink in as much as it would have now.  There's also something different and a bit removed about experiencing the death of your great-grandparents or grandparents' friends than knowing a friend's first baby girl who passed because of a rare cancer, or your dentist who went to the church you grew up in who also passed away from cancer, or the tragedy of the pastor who did your pre-marital counseling who suddenly passed from a rare pregnancy complication right after giving birth to her second child.  It all hits much closer to home and wells up that it-doesn't-seem-fair kind of anger in me that comes from an less familiar part of my heart.

Being out of school and out of those immediate relational contexts makes me feel like I've forgotten all I've learned intellectually and relationally.  And it's still so easy for me to compare myself to others (I know, I know, bad habit) that it's hard for me to figure out what I'm actually good at or what I can even offer the world.  I've been letting my drive, my focus, and my discipline drip out of me like a leaky faucet.

This blog has kind of been like a bucket underneath the leaky faucet.  I'm not really sure how to stop the leak, but I'm catching what I can and am trying to figure out what to do with it.  This blog, even with long breaks between posts, is the only thing I keep coming back to.

At least I'm not too naive to think that I'll have everything figured out in my thirties.