Musings on growing up

I am so happy, but in a way that is complex and has a little dash of bittersweet and impossible mixed into insurmountable joy. Which is perfect and just the way I like it. Plain vanilla is boring. Vanilla bean is where it's at. I'm vanilla bean happy. Everything's smooth and tastes like heaven but there's a little zip to it -- that zip being the tiny heartbreaks and memories and private emotional stumbles along the way.

I've come to a place of growing up... by that I mean that I've reconciled the past and present. I accept the things that would no longer work for my present life,  but were amazing in my past. I have learned to appreciate those past things, and know that it's okay to miss them sometimes without that meaning that I am not satisfied with now. I can face honestly the days when I wish I could run away from stable happy family life and run off with a beautiful stranger and feel passion and anger and adventure and discover something completely new. I can have those feelings and accept them, and then go crawl into bed with stability. I stopped mourning over the "was" and it has been the greatest thing for me.

I am so grateful for all these different lives I've lived and how they've shaped me. I've lived in so many cities and towns. I've had more lovers than I'll ever tell you. I've had so many shapes and faces and phases. But inside it all I have always had this one constant. It's something inside I can't explain. I guess we all have one. The true self that withstands everything and even major changes to ourselves. It's the core, the person we were predestined to be even before our life shaped us. Sometimes I like who I am and sometimes I don't, but I always like that core. What a beautiful core it is. I see this core as something that we take from past lives and into future ones. It is the only way we recognize ourselves and our past/future loved ones recognize us when we bump into each other. Our cores recognize each other even when all the other pieces of the game are completely different.

We all have different ways to define maturity. What one person's rite of passage into adulthood is, another's might not be. For me personally it was reaching this reconciling of past and present. I am so happy to be at this point in my life.