quarterlife wisdom

I love that I still have all my old journals and blog entries, dating back to when I was about nineteen. I’m writing a novel about this very particular age, between 18 and 24, when you’re absolutely not a child anymore, and so very barely an adult. Just so ambiguously in between that it’s maddening. Do you remember that age? Before children, before real jobs, when you had time to sit around, in between morning classes and nighttime waitressing shifts, to just drink beer and smoke weed and ponder the intricacies of life?

The 23-year-old me wrote that 24 is when it’s time to grow up. That one is “no longer, at all, a child anymore, but undeniably an adult.” I would have 23-year-old Laura talk to 28-year-old Laura’s husband this morning, and I think he would beg to differ 😉

God, I knew it all back then. I knew everything! What an age that was, when you just know it all. And then, as you get older, you figure out little by little that you just didn’t have a clue.

I wrote this in July of 2004, when I was 23. I don’t even remember who this was about, lol.

Some people:

The way she is sometimes, this person, is like we’re not even inhabitants of the same planet. Or at least, I’m not an inhabitant of her planet. And it makes me mad, because she just kind of floats along, like the world is her game, like she’s about to wake up from one of those really trippy dreams.

But what she doesn’t realize is that she’s not actually dreaming, and that the rest of us have been awake all along.

Some people are just like that. And you stick with them, because you love them, even though it doesn’t really matter, because they are so completely out of it that they can’t tell you from somebody else, from anyone in the whole world.

And dramatic. Oh, how dramatic I was!