On contemplating another year half gone

Today is the first of July, which means that the year is half over already. This observable proof of the passage of time always gives me a sort of clenching feeling in my heart, half sadness because I can't hold on tightly enough to the beautiful moments that keep slipping through my fingers like beach sand, and half dread because that familiar anxious feeling that some unknowable Bad Thing is always just around the corner seems to reappear whenever I stop to mark the passage of time. Overall, though, those anxious moments have been fewer and farther between this year, which is a huge achievement for me.

Maybe it's turning thirty, which I did two days before 2010 began. For someone who drags her feet constantly during the process of, you know, living, my thirtieth birthday couldn't have come fast enough. I was so ready to leave my twenties behind. And it wasn't just the fact that 29 was, hands down, the most difficult year of my life. I mean, that was a large part of it, but it was also just that I felt a sort of completion, almost satisfaction, about being irrevocably done with my twenties. I could look back on even the best parts of that decade, and love them, without desiring to go back. The part where I was a barefoot hippie girl sitting on an enormous Roman ruin in a French village drinking red wine out of the bottle, and talking philosophy and life and religion and ambition with my equally hippyish friends. Or the part where I was a girl in love kissing my future husband on the kitchen floor of his college apartment, Nick Cave blaring from the stereo, and our roommates and friends dancing and drinking whiskey sours in the living room. The part where I was two people in one, a mother with my own little baby fluttering inside me and keeping me company through my long nights working in the ER. No, I don't want to go back there, even if I could. That girl was so filled with self-doubt and searching and sadness and longing. And me, well, I think I'm finally learning how to just accept myself, to know that this is it, this is who I am, and that's okay. No, it's better than okay, because who I am is actually really lovable and smart and unique and witty. Who knew?

I remember once when I was in high school, and I went to Mexico with my youth group for spring break to paint this orphanage. And it should have been this amazing experience, right? But you know what I remember about it? How a bunch of girls who I thought were my dearest friends had some bizarre mean girl intervention on me and told me that I was annoying because I tried too hard to copy other girls. Did you get that? Apparantly at age sixteen every other girl already knows exactly who they are, and feels no need to emulate her peers. Just me, the pathetic, copy cat loser. This is, of course, ridiculous. All sixteen-year-olds try to be exactly like their friends. I mean, have you ever really looked at a group of highschool girls walking down the street? They all dress exactly like their friends, like they're wearing some kind of uniform---a strangely out of season Ugg boots and denim mini skirt uniform. But at the time, I was absolutely gutted. It was like these girls had stuck a knife right through my soft underbelly and exposed the stark nakedness of my insecure teenage soul. I was grief-stricken that I had been found out! That I was a fraud, and everyone knew it! That while I was going along with everyone else, trying to act cool, everyody saw right through me, that I was just a nerdy, awkward, bookish girl who had never even kissed a boy. And some variation on that feeling dogged me for the next fourteen years.

And now, now I feel like I am finally starting to be free of that insecurity. Because you know what? Not everyone is going to like you. You're going to disappoint people, and you're going to make people angry, and people are at some point going to say mean things to you. There is absolutely no way to escape it. You have to just accept it and move on and live your life. Wow, you're all thinking, you should totally write a self-help book based on that astounding and completely unique revelation! Well, ha ha, everyone, but it actually is an astounding revelation to me. That people get mad at me, disappointed in me, say mean things to me and the world doesn't end. I keep living and enjoying my life and making plans and making other friends and being loved and that's it. That's life.