I have been reading my old journals again.
This is not, I should say, an entirely noble practice. I like to pretend I am doing important anthropological research. That I am studying the emotional weather patterns of late adolescence and early adulthood so I can better understand my children, who are now roughly the same age I was when I wrote some of these entries.
This sounds mature. Almost scholarly.
In truth, it is also because I am nosy. Even about myself.
· · ·
There is something deeply strange about meeting your younger self on the page.
She is familiar, of course. She has your handwriting, your obsessions, your tendency to over-explain things to no one in particular. But she is also wildly foreign. Dramatic in ways you had forgotten. Tender in ways you want to protect. Absolutely convinced that certain disappointments are not merely disappointing, but evidence of some permanent flaw in the design of her life.
A bad conversation could take up six pages.
A confusing boy could take up twelve.
A missed opportunity, a bruised friendship, a vague feeling of not being chosen, not being seen, not being far enough along, not being whatever it was I thought I was supposed to be by Thursday, could become the emotional centrepiece of an entire week.
And at the time, those things were big.
That is the part I have to remind myself of.
· · ·
They were not silly because they look smaller now. They were not insignificant because life eventually outgrew them.
At twenty, your world is not smaller because you are shallow. It is smaller because it is still being built. Every room feels central because there are not that many rooms yet.
A breakup is not one heartbreak among many. It is the heartbreak.
A bad mark is not a data point. It is a prophecy.
A friendship shift is not a chapter changing. It is the whole library catching fire.
This is what I try to remember when my own children move through their lives with the particular intensity of young adulthood. The waiting. The wondering. The terrible suspense of not yet knowing who you are going to become.
· · ·
At midlife, suspense changes shape.
It does not disappear, exactly, but it stops arriving with quite the same theatrical lighting. We have lived through enough plot twists to know that most things are not endings. They are weather. Sometimes bad weather. Sometimes the kind that knocks branches into the street and takes the power out for two days. But still weather.
And then, of course, there are the real things.
The phone calls that divide life into before and after.
The illnesses.
The losses.
The betrayals.
The moments when the floor gives way and you learn, not as a concept but as a fact, that life can be rearranged without asking your permission.
Once those things happen, the old big things begin to shrink.
Not because they did not matter. They did. They mattered to the person you were then. But they no longer occupy the same square footage. They move from the front hall to a drawer somewhere in the back. You can still find them if you go looking. You can still remember the sting. But they no longer run the house.
· · ·
This, I think, is one of the great and quiet recalibrations of getting older.
Your scale changes.
You begin to understand that there are problems, and then there are problems.
There are embarrassments that feel fatal but are not. There are rejections that feel definitive but are not. There are disappointments that feel like evidence, but are really just disappointments wearing a slightly better outfit.
And then there are the things that teach you what matters because they take something real.
· · ·
Reading those old journals, I can see how earnestly I mistook intensity for significance. If something hurt badly enough, I assumed it must mean something enormous. If I thought about it constantly, surely it had to be important.
Now I know that some things are loud because they are important.
And some things are loud because you are young.
There is a mercy in this, although it does not always feel merciful at the time. Time does not erase everything, but it does refile it. It takes the enormous, flaming thing from the centre of the room and, eventually, makes it part of the furniture. You can walk past it. You can even sit beside it with a cup of coffee.
You can say, "Oh yes. That."
Not with contempt. Not with superiority. But with a kind of amused tenderness.
Oh yes, that thing I thought would undo me.
Oh yes, that person I thought held the key.
Oh yes, that version of myself, trying so hard to make sense of a life that had barely begun.
· · ·
And perhaps this is why I keep reading the journals.
Not to cringe, although there is certainly cringing. Not to laugh, although I do occasionally want to reach through the pages and tell her to stop writing in capital letters.
I read them because they remind me that every age has its own scale.
My children are not overreacting to their lives. They are reacting to the size their lives are right now. Their problems fill the rooms they have. Their joys do too. The small things are not small yet because life has not yet placed them beside the larger ones.
· · ·
This is hard to remember when you are in the middle years and have become, by necessity, a person who can hold several kinds of reality at once.
Dinner needs to be made. The car needs gas. Someone needs a dentist appointment. A friend is grieving. A parent is aging. A child is uncertain. The dishwasher is making that sound again.
And still, somewhere in the middle of it all, a small old wound taps on the glass and says, remember me?
Yes, I remember.
But I also know where to put you now.
· · ·
That may be one of the gifts of midlife. Not that we are wiser in some grand, linen-clad, standing-in-a-field-at-sunset way. But that we have lived long enough to understand proportion.
We know that some things pass.
We know that some things don't.
We know that the trick is learning which is which, preferably before spending six pages on a man who owned one interesting sweater and no discernible emotional range.
Though, in fairness, some lessons have to be handwritten.
~ Danielle
The Midlife Syllabus
Lesson #23
Some things only become small after life has shown you what big really means.
Beauty, Grace & Daily Artistry
A small, imperfect pleasure:
My children are back to entertaining me while cleaning up the kitchen after dinner.
The belly laughs that fart jokes still produce just don't get old.
What I'm Reading, Watching, or Listening to
Listening
The sound of the birds at dawn in my apple tree.
Spring is the best.
This Week on the Blog
There's a particular tone of voice people use when their life isn't tidy. "I'm in a bit of a transition right now." "It's been chaotic lately, but we're managing." "It's not ideal, but we're getting through it."
This week I am musing on the phrases we reach for when life doesn't fit neatly in a bullet point.