As far as this has gotten me in life (it has mostly served as an advantage), it has also taxed me in dumb ways. I don't always allow myself the permission of being a twenty-four-year-old girl. Others my age are worried about what Justin Bieber did at Coachella to piss everyone off and I am sitting in deep conviction over the words of Ram Dass, wondering why I had to be born again into the strenuous cycle of birth and death. Believe me, please, I know how this comes off. This sounds like I am perhaps ahead of those my age and painting them to look stupid for caring about pop culture. People my age still care about things that matter. The problem is that what I believe matters looks different sometimes. In many ways I still behave as a bright-eyed twenty-something year old.
The point is that I am more often than not, taking up space as something much older. This is my nature. Something that's been around the sun for a long time. The articulation of my heart is not twenty-four and when I was only a child, that articulation was not a child. Writing this now, I do not know that this is exactly a problem that I have with myself or simply a part of my character that I should feel a healthy indifference for. The voice in my heart speaks, "There is no should and should not" while the body I am in does not get enough sleep and spends too much money on fancy oils and soaps when my health insurance bill is clawing at me. This is okay. I see no benefit in creating stories about this and yet I do.
In moments I will feel my age. In others, I will feel the vibration of something ancient that is only watching a version of myself be twenty-four. When I read old pages of my diary and see words of anger long diffused. When I sit in a circle of people I love and think of only the thankfulness of their being alive. When the ocean calls me and I listen. When I can pause inside of a pocket of time by my own intentionality and feel that none of this is random. That is when I feel it does not matter what age I am. It does not matter how separate I feel from others with a disposition such as my own. I lean into the silk curtain of unbridled awareness that knows that I am no age at all, and I have never been.
