For who knows how my love grows? And who knows where the time goes?

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. ~1 Corinthians 13:11

I'm having a Sandy Denny kind of night.

Under the pretense of tidying up my bookshelves, I read my old journals from middle/high today. I only ask two things of my friends and family if I was to die suddenly: 1) Please don't let the horrible state of my bedroom taint your memory of me and 2) throw those damn journals out and for God's sake, don't read them. I said so many things that I didn't really mean. I would throw them out myself, except that I get a sort of grim satisfaction from reading them, and they never fail to make me less anxious about getting older. I don't want to be a teenager again. You certainly couldn't pay me a gazillion dollars and get me to go back to middle school. It's a wonder any of us make it out alive. I was so dramatic, so misunderstood, so troubled.

It's not all bad, those journals. It's interesting to look back at my budding self--the fervent political life of my Governor's School years, the yearning to please my teachers, the self-righteous moralism. (Isn't it nice to be 18 and know EVERYTHING?) Amidst the angst and drama and ridiculousness of my interior life in adolescence, there is, at least towards the end, an astonishing confidence that radiates through it all. Looking back, I always think of what a brave little person I was, and yet all I remember is the fear and doubt.

I will be a quarter of a century old on Friday. I think that getting older doesn't bother me as much as it used to now that I have resigned myself to the fact that deep down I will never feel all that different from my ten-year-old self. We carry our child-selves with us forever. There is no real adulthood cut off and distinguished from our childhood. We carry many of the same desires, the same fears, the same strengths, the same insecurities. We never really put away all our childish things. We just learn to articulate them better and to ignore them when needed.