Have you ever been in the mountains, tens of thousands of feet away from the solid, sea-level earth? You feel like you are hovering not here, nor there, but somewhere else. This is what 2011 felt like for me.
This year was really, really tough for me.
Did you know that? Did you sense my worry, my sleepless nights, the anxiety that welled up inside me like a ghost? I hope you didn’t. I hope you peered at my Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn and thought, what a strong bold Mermaid that one is, unstoppable, effervescent, beaming like a winter sun. That’s how you need to look in tough times to everyone else.
But you’re not everyone else. You’re someone who reads this blog because I promised to be honest with you, so I won’t try to be the winter sun here, the cold hard beams that touch you and make you feel colder. That isn’t me, here.
This year I’ve had to make major decisions in every single thing that I do and be and live by, and those decisions feel heavier then they did when I was 23 or 24. I’m 26 now. I gaze in the mirror and I’m still young, but less young. I have time, but less time. I feel like I’m putting on a suite and it’s slowly zipping me up into adulthood.
I’ve realized that the hardest thing about growing up is not the DOING of tough adult-like things like work and houses and investments, but those in-between phases when you’re doing nothing. When you’re choosing what to do next. Your own liminality is the hardest pat of adulthood. That’s a word I learned in anthropology class, liminal, to be something that is not here or there but in-between, the threshold of a door, the tip top of a peak where men and mountain gods meet.
But you know what made me feel better? This first line of a story that Rose Finn wrote when she was 8. Rose was my editor for an article I wrote, and she’s also a writer, but that’s all I know about her. I couldn’t find her on Twitter or Facebook or LinkedIn, those places where I hope I look tough and strong. But I found her here saying things we all know but always forget:
“Hi, my name is Amy. My parents died in a car crash. But I’m okay now, because it’s fall, and the leaves are crisp.”
