When Your Friends Grow Up Faster Than You

Growing up sucks. Bills, insurance, work, and responsibilities: I’m trying hard to keep it all together.

But I’m young. And the fact that I’m eating cereal right out of the box because I can’t afford milk is just one of those side effects of trying to find yourself…right?

At least that’s what I thought. Until I went back to school this weekend (for the first of many weddings) and realized that everyone had gone and grown up while I was searching for pennies to pay for my coffee in New York.

It isn’t that I’m stuck back in my college days. In fact, I did quite the opposite after graduating. I moved further away (literally and figuratively) than anyone from home. But when I went back I realized that while I was still trying to find myself they had already done just that. With steady jobs, big rocks on their fingers, wedding planning and bed times.

My already confused and heartbroken self had just encountered one thing I had never planned on: my friends, all 23 and 24, were acting old.

Now I’m not saying that they were stiffs, we all drank and danced and had a really good time at the wedding. Sh*t, they even played Chubby Bunny by the bonfire (yes, there was a bonfire). But at the end of the night, when we got back to our hotel room, everyone was tired and wanted to go to bed…. at midnight.

And I was stuck on the floor with half a beer and some pistachios wondering what had happened to the girls that used to stay up half the night goofing off and talking and laughing until we cried or peed our pants or both.

Maybe it was the fact that I felt such a chasm between us. Me, up in New York a predictable mess and trying to find out what I want for myself. And them, down South, having everything figured out.

But it isn’t so much the geography that separates us but the ideals of what we want. I suppose I don’t want to have everything figured out right now because years later I want to know that I struggled and I searched and I understood where I was going before I got there.

I am happy for them that they have it all together and I am happy for me that I am just now starting to fall apart.

I know that this life, this unpredictable, messy, emotional life I am trying to sort out is the one I am supposed to be living. So maybe I am not grown up yet. But I’m looking forward to the years it takes me to become the grown up I am meant to be.