All my recently tagged photos are of me in India. Which makes sense. Because I, you know, live here. How silly. LA girl moves to India. I can just imagine my kids going "oh yah, and then my mom picked up and went to live in a rural Indian village for 10 months when she was 21." Ridiculous. I have moments where it's like I'm watching my life from above. Ohhh, there she goes again. Watch out for the buffalo crap in the middle of the brick road there, Kristen.
I'm turning 22 in a matter of... t-minus 3 days. At first I found this terrifying. 22 is grown up age. People meet the person they're going to marry at 22. People get engaged at 22. People go to grad school and get jobs and join the real world at 22. That's an adult age.
And then I remember that I picked up and moved by myself to rural Punjab. Oh. Right. Maybe I hit grown up a while ago and didn't even see the mark.
Or perhaps there isn't a "grown up" version of ourselves to morph into. My aunt had the best response to my (almost) quarter life crisis: "I think that growing up is mostly a figment of the collective imagination, but I could be wrong on that one-- I think we just are who we are, at whatever age we happen to be."
Because at 22 I will still be the girl that laughs too loudly and delights too eagerly in simple things, who jumps in head before feet, is incapable of doing anything "lukewarm," who over-analyzes everything to a fault, and has a troublesome forte for "complexity," just as I was at 16 and will be at 49.
And, ideally, things like moving across the globe to a developing country where I know neither a friend nor the language (wtf) and dancing in the kitchen with stirring spoon in hand will still somehow strike me as a good idea.... even when my age and circumstance are "grown."
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