Growing Up (Again)

Sitting in my new apartment, finally equipped with Internet and cleaned up enough to provide at least minimal habitability, I reflect on the strangeness of being here. The only thing that I can compare it to is the very beginning of college. Common to both is the bitter, almost unbearable sadness that came with the realization that this moment marked an irrevocable change -a change that could not be delayed or undone. It was the realization that my desire to experience the past was too late, or rather, that the rate of my subjective development was out of sync with the objective, and that I had no choice but to 'go with the flow' - or drown.

But this time is not as bad as the previous. Isolation from familiar people and familiar routines is not as suffocating as it was four years ago. What does not kill us expands the contours of our inner lives, allowing us to encompass things that had previously been alien. My father says that older people have less need of human contact, that the need for social affirmation fades. I doubt that my father is a good representative of the population as a whole, but it seems, all the same, that every trauma inures one to those that follow, and that the inescapable, solitary core of human experience (one really notices it during transitions like mine, where it becomes hard to believe that it is possible to speak to other people and expect a response) grows with each of those traumas, so that not only is the pain of each subsequent trauma reduced, but the capability of experiencing enormous change without being mutilated by it expands as well.

Here's to emerging changed but unmutilated.