Growing Up

It's interesting how time passes. You usually can't recognize the change in yourself or others until you step back and compare the present to the pas. I know that I've changed since high school but I hadn't realized how much until I was going through my old documents and came across a conversation I had with a friend of mine that for some reason I'd saved. The way I expressed myself when I was 17 is completely different from how I express myself now. Sentence phrasing, thought processes, emotions...all very different. I'm still the same person but, put simply, I've matured.

In other ways, I'm still exactly the same. I came across some old tech documents and realized I had the instincts of a stage manager long before I was taught. The stage managers at Catalina aren't given much power or responsibility but my desire for order and control led me to create schedules and documents that resemble methods I use now to run my shows. That's pretty cool to see.

Sometimes we're in a rush to grow up. But it doesn't need to happen all at once. We get that first taste of independence and suddenly want to take on the world, not realizing that we have many years to perfect our tastes, our styles, our skills, and our careers. I have to reign myself in on a daily basis. I have to remind myself that I don't have to be the perfect chef now, that knowing how to buy and arrange the furniture in the living room doesn't have to be a skill I need now, that my style should still reflect my unique personality and will continue to grow with me, that financial security takes time, that I'm still a student and should treat me life as such, and that I don't need to have my entire life planned out this second.

I have the tendency to live in the future. I want to have an established game plan and I don't like unease. I like knowing what's coming up. But no one knows what's about to come. For all I know, life could take me in a completely opposite but equally amazing direction than what I'm planning right now. And that needs to be okay or I'm just going to lose my mind.