SOLSC '24 Day Eighteen: Rebirth

The night before my eighteenth birthday, I cried myself to sleep.

I didn't want to be a legal adult.  To me, that meant the tremendous weight of responsibility, financial finagling, the daily grind that comes with having to care for oneself.  I was enjoying my senior year far too much to jump into that role.  Fortunately, my anxiety lessened enough to allow the excitement of college to take over five months later--though it would resurface when the rest of my nuclear family moved across the world halfway through my freshman year.  Those fears were realized in full without my mom a regular phone call away; collect overseas calls were expensive and limited to every few weeks.  Somehow I muddled through and managed to graduate in three years and land a job.

I see now that it was the beginning of my second trimester of being.  Let me explain...

I am currently reading The Pivot Year by Brianna Wiest, at the recommendation of a friend.  It is a book of short daily passages to ponder.  On day 159, there was a passage about growth coming from being present and open to the wonderful things that can still happen.  In my half-awake writing response to the passage, I wrote this:  "DO SOMETHING!  Don't just sit and scroll and shop.  Read, learn, craft, apply, move forward.  There are things still left to unfold, happen, excite and entertain.  Even in this third trimester of living!"

Huh?  Where did "third trimester" come from?  (No, I am not pregnant; that would be a medical miracle on SO many levels.)

The more I thought about it, though, the more it made sense.  That young adult me was still forming, still growing in more physical and foundational ways, like the second trimester baby in utero. But now...I'm staring down a hopefully long road to the last third of my life.  I've got the basics of holding down a job, household routines, making sure there's gas in the car.  I've gotten rid of some baggage that held me down, like those cells between our fingers and toes that most of us lose while developing inside our mothers.  

I feel like I'm getting closer to finding out what is really important.  I'm beginning to stretch and kick at the walls that hold me in and hold me back...and maybe dance a little, while I'm at it.  Hopefully, when I push through this earthly veil to be birthed to the great beyond, I'm be a fully formed, fully realized human being.