3 min read
On the 29th of March 2021 I turned 26 years old. For me, the idea of being this side of the 30 milestone was completely alien, even as I type this, it still perplexes me that I'm closer to 30 than 20 at this point. Whilst it's a scary thought, the combination of the events of the past year suddenly putting a lot of us in the position where we have significantly less to occupy and distract our thoughts than ever before, and my own recent train of thought has led me to retracing my steps and revisiting traces of the person/people I used to be.
When I got married in 2019, I found myself reconnecting with a lot of the people I would credit with raising me through my teenage years and contributing largely to the person I am today, conversations rekindled, breaking silences that were, in most cases, years long, not for any particular reason other than just life happening. I've recently started reaching out to the people I used to, and largely still do, consider my chosen family, and it's been a very strange experience. On one hand, it's so natural with most of them that the years melt away and it feels like no time has passed since our last conversation, but then I find myself referencing things I knew about them that aren't the case anymore and the realisation of a significant amount of time passing and the significant changes that come with that looms large and I have to take a step back to take it all in and I wonder how I got to that stage in the first place.
It's weird that in an age of social media being a part of everyday life in modern society, this disconnect can still happen. Perhaps it's because we present only the highlights of ourselves on social media for the most part and as a result it almost becomes more of a peripheral awareness of these people's existence than a knowledge of them and who they are as people. Or perhaps it's just a side-effect of this formative stage in the life of your average adult, where we tend to focus in on ourselves and working on getting ourselves into what we would consider a good position that interpersonal relationships start to drift if they aren't regularly maintained.
I think I'm going to keep this post short and sweet because if I don't, I'm going to ramble on incoherently for the next 3000 words!
Consider this just a longer tweet on your timeline! Haha