I still feel young, until I go to class...

2016 was a year of change for me.  I lost my youth.  (I turned 30.  Ask most women, this is a big deal.)  I decided to go back to school to one day teach art and history.  I still FEEL young most of the time.  Then, my classes started, and I found myself surrounded by young men and women under the age of twenty. 

For the most part, age hasn't been discussed too often.  But, of course, the first days of classes everyone is curious about the person sitting next to them or the Professor decides they want to know a brief version of who we are and why we're there.  During one of my Humanities classes, the Professor told us that she would need all the money up front for the field trips we were going to take this semester.  She said she took PayPal and also checks.  I pull out my checkbook, write the check, then jot it down in the register and balance it.  The young girl next to me, she is 19, gasped.  "Oh my gosh!!  I've never seen one of those in real life!" (talking about my check register) "You even do all the math stuff and everything!  That is so cool!"

My eyes got wide and my face went to a lovely shade of lobster.  In that moment, I felt like shit for ever calling anyone old.  I do remember what it was like to be 19.  I remember feeling like people who were older than 25 not only were old, but that they must have really had their lives together.

Now, I'm the old one.  I'm a Freshman in college, I have no real career, no children/family of my own (well, except for my dog), and I do not have my life together.  It's a complete mess at the moment if we're being honest.  But it's my mess, and I'm learning to embrace the season of changes I'm going through.

I guess the moral of this whole post is this:  I spent my younger years yearning to grow up.  I imagined exactly where I would be and what I'd be doing when I turned 30 (I was way off).  There have been a whole lot of moments where I got depressed or angry or frustrated that I was nowhere near where I had wanted to be, but I've come to realize that no one has their life together.  Not really.  Life is just this crap shoot of good and bad.  We get what we get, and it's up to us to choose how we react to it.  If we choose to let it make us bitter and grouchy and sad, well then that's what we'll be.  If we choose to be thankful that we get any moments at all in this fragile thing we call life, then we see quite a bit more of the good than the bad.

So, I'll be happy that I'm old and decrepit to my young classmates.  I'm a much better student at 30 than I would have been at 19.  I'm more hungry to learn than I would have been.  

Class starts soon, so I better get my Depends on and my cane.  ;)