Most people have a beautiful way of commemorating growing up. Birthday parties, making marks on the wall to measure height, photographs, cards. I measure my growth by looking at stickers. When I was little and I got stickers, I would treasure them, and think very strategically about where to place them. It took me days, even weeks, sometimes, to plan sticker placement. But when I put the sticker where I wanted it to be, I was always confident in my decision. It would remain there forever, unchanged, and it would be preserved in the memory of that spot. As I grew a little bit older, I stopped thinking through my sticker placement and just put them where I pleased. As I grew more, I came to regret some of those placements, so I went back to being strategic. This was fine until I hit early adolescence when sticker placement became a crippling fear because I couldn't commit to a certain location and then leave the sticker there to rot. What if it didn't look right?
That was a dark, sticker-free time in my life. As I navigated the haze of adolescence and the worst of it passed, stickers became forbidden fruits. I loved them and wanted to have them, but knew that would only mean pain, both for the stickers and for me. I stayed away, thinking that by closing myself off from things that made me happy, I was lessening my dependence on materialism and becoming stronger.
A couple of years ago, I decided that I wanted stickers again. I dipped my toes into the pool of stickers carefully, selecting only the ones that I really liked, either because they matched my aesthetic or they made me smile. I started putting them in places, and the only requirement was that I had to be able to see those places a lot, and see the stickers a lot. That helped me get over my fear of sticking stickers.
And that's how I knew I was growing up. I learned that sometimes, things don't have to have a purpose except to make you happy. The stickers don't always have a manifest destiny of preserving artistic integrity even as civilization crumbles. Sometimes, I just want to put a sticker of a frog on my breadboard, and smile when I see it. And sometimes, that's enough.
With that sticker, that carefree, smiley sticker, I knew I had made it. I am growing. And that is fine.
