growing up

"Adolescence is a time where you act upon your impulse and you leave the tangled knots as is, ignoring loose ends. Adulthood is a time when intuition and reason mix, and I'm not ready for that just yet."

I wrote that when I was just about to turn eighteen, when I thought I was grown just because I was old enough to buy my own cigarettes. Eighteen. Reading the entries eighteen year old Hannah wrote in an old diary, she seems a lot wiser than twenty-three year old me right now. Though, of course, it's different when it comes to how things played out; back then, I thought I knew the world and I thought I knew what it meant to be an adult, to be grown. Back then, I lived inside my head, wrapped around in the shell of my unpleasant and unfortunate experiences, and I analyzed and thought I understood what it meant to be grown without really paying my dues to the growing process.

I guess it's slightly true, what I wrote about adolescence. In retrospect, I was such an impulsive creature, and I couldn't tell the difference between speaking up and speaking out. I've tangled so many knots and just cut them free without even bothering to try to smooth things out, and heaven knows just how many loose ends I've just let hang.

It seems fitting that I came across this old diary of mine, and it's so fitting that this particular line caught my attention. For the past couple weeks, I've been looking into myself, rearranging and discarding a few things here and there, slowly realizing that I wasn't ever so far away from being an adolescent all this time. I kept speaking out when all I needed was to speak up, I kept rebelling with no real cause, and I kept displaying an array of false confidence, like a vain peacock, taking on such a misogynistic air (what an oxymoron!). Through these two weeks of introspection, I realized that I was still acting like I needed to prove something, still acting like I was bound by social and cultural obligations and norms. What a dramatic teen!

I don't think I've ever seen her, the woman I want to be, so clearly. I don't know why it just dawned on me to do the things I've already known for so long to get to her. I guess, I still love to learn things the hard way.

So, here's to me, finally ready to mix intuition and reason. To finally untangling knots and tying loose ends. However, I don't think I'll ever really stop acting on impulse, but I guess it's not really an impulse when you contemplate the action for a couple days after the urge, haha.