The more growing up I do, the more disorienting it gets.

Time moves so quickly that most times I feel like I’m struggling to stay above the water while the waves crash over me. Change upon change leaves me feeling incredibly unstable and uncomfortable.

I often look back on years of my life gone in the blink of an eye and can remember details of really great days as if it were yesterday. This is when the disorientation sets in, when the details are so salient I can’t believe I’m not still in that time, in that place, with those people. It seems so far away and so close at the same time.

So when I think about turning twenty in a little over a month I almost don’t believe it. I was sixteen yesterday I swear.

As you grow older you have to reconcile where you thought you’d be at that age with where you really are. I imagined I would be wiser, more put together, with a better idea of what I want and where I’m going. Instead I still feel like the floor could fall out beneath me at any time and expose that I’m scared and confused and not as grown up as I wanted to be when this time came.

Getting older is recognizing that adulthood comes in waves and that you don’t suddenly wake up with a direction, you have to work for it. It’s realizing that you’re forever changed and that your life won’t go back to the way things were.

It’s terrifying.

And apparently, it only gets harder than this.