Perspicacity

And so with that, I'm thirty four. With gifts opened, cards propped and well wishes received, life goes on as it was, except now my second number is bigger than my first. Not my best, but not my worst. Certainly the first birthday I didn't fully embrace, a number I wasn't entirely ready to be.

When I think back to this day a year ago, five years ago, ten, in some ways it feels like reflecting on another person's life lived. Even rereading my post from this year's beginning, confident of a best year ever, now smacks of juvenile naivete, full of rainbows and unicorns and puppies and pink. Because at this wizened age, these mid-thirties I find myself in, I've come to the realization that life is a hell of a lot harder than I thought it would be. Sure, there's a lot of great stuff - really, really great stuff, but there's also a lot of crap. Challenging, painful, difficult, unfair, drawn out crap, and from my vantage point anyway, there seems to be a lot more of it out here at the end of the limb, anted into this game of Risk, on this road less and less taken.

Indeed these days, look though I may, I fear any vestiges of my carefree can-do twenties are well and truly gone. Opportunities to be weak, frivolous and blithe seem to have checked themselves somewhere along the way - Mountain time, the mighty Mississippi, the Montgomery County border, who knows exactly. And what's left in their place? Apparently an urgent need for bravery, patience and resilience in amounts I didn't think I had in me. The opportunity to accept with grace that life once and for all really isn't fair. The achievement of finding the strength to smile (even laugh!) with a wicked big lump in my throat with no one the wiser. The chance to shut up. To speak up. To listen. Really listen. And a million more odd little moments that are both vexingly humbling and oddly empowering.

Is this adulthood? Um, like, I dunno.