I have spent a lot of time thinking about this new number. I spent this past ten years learning that numbers don’t define a person—not their grade point average or weight. But age… Age does define you. A little bit. Sure, it’s “just a number,” but there is a great deal of difference between a toddler and a teenager. Twenty, though it is not a milestone of any sort, seems strange. Can vote, can’t have a drink. Can drive and can die for my country, but most likely still in college with no idea what’s going on.
I had big plans for the last decade of my life. I don’t think they were very fleshed out, but they were certainty not something I expected. I thought the teenage years were going to be full of parties and friends and proms and love and finding out what I was supposed to be. Instead, there were family dance parties. There was falling in love in a high school classroom. And heartbreaks over the phone. There were friends laughing over lunch tables and later over skype. There were a few proms and bad dancing (or, as it is now referred to “the mom bop”) and oh, yeah, setbacks. A lot of them. Each time I thought I was in the right spot, the moments I thought that nothing to ever bring me down, something did.
I spent a long time hoping for ideal. For perfect. But what I got was real.
It’s a new decade. A decade I will spend learning about medicine. I can’t wait to spend it learning everything there is to learn. I will spend it writing, laughing and loving. But, you might think, didn’t I do that in the last one? For some of it, sure. But I also spent a lot of time worrying. Trying to have it right.
And then, near the end of these teenage years that I had forever been looking forward to, I threw my plans out the window. What I thought was going to my twenties working for a publishing company, turned into years of med school and residency, if things go as planned. And, to be clear, they won’t.
So, no. I don’t expect to have answers or my plans to stay in place. The world is half as clear as it used to be. And what a great thing that is.
