People say all the time that teenagers think they will live forever. I guess they mean that teenagers do dangerous, risky, stupid things all the time. But when I think back on my own teenage years, I think that I really had no idea how long life could really be. It's not that I thought about death all the time, or that I thought that after thirty, there would be nothing interesting going on in my life. It was that I could not imagine what interesting things there might be. I was limited in my capacity to envision the future. I knew that I wouldn't go on being young and beautiful and fit forever. But I didn't know what would come after. I could see adults all around me and I could not imagine how it was that I would grow into--that.

In some ways, I haven't. I've refused to. But in other ways, it happens. And I now understand the transformation a little better. I see how you live through the passage. I'm not saying I enjoyed it much. But it came and I survived it and came out on the other end. All those embarrassing moments, which at the time, seemed like they would have to be fatal, that no one would ever survive such humiliation, or that if they did, they would never live it down, turned out to be small in the overall scope of things. They turned out to be "not-so-bad," all things considered. Scary, that I could look back on them and laugh, that I could reach a point where that stuff doesn't matter anymore.

Scary for the teenage me. Good for the old/new me.

It is so strange to have that young person nestled inside the skin of the other person, who sees fifty years stretching out into the future and can encompass that much time, can see how much will get done, how much will not get done, and how many obstacles may be in the way. Who can see that today's humiliations will someday also be nothing, even if that thought makes them hurt even worse this moment, because I am not big enough yet to put them away.