It is amazing the number of people who I went to high school with who made it home this year. It is to the point that so many have families, jobs and responsibility getting home is much harder. It has been a lot of fun. Not as much spending time talking about old times (though some of that has happened), but more talking about the people we have turned into. Definition of adult success at 18 is different from adult success when you are an adult. We have all turned into things we never dreamed of, but most of us have turned into things that make sense for who we are. We have become teachers, chefs, dancers, sound techs, and journalists.
I think back to what my 18 year old self thought my thirties were going to be like. I know it is not what I have become. Even if I could have imaged this was a possibility, I never would have dreamed I would be this joyful about my life. It is hard because the 18 year old me seems to be a completely different person in so many ways. At 18 people in their thirties seemed so old, so serious, so foreign.
As an 18 year old my definition of success was wide panoramic water color. Covering lots of space with muted colors and un-crisp edges. Now success is a much tighter shot. It is not the whole world, but my world (which keeps growing and changing). The colors are much more vivid. There is much more precision. From the outside it would be easy to accuse me of shrinking my dreams because it would look like my definition of adult success has shrunk. I think as time passes we know ourselves more. My definition of success at 18 now looks like a silly guess. It wasn’t any more or less a guess than today because it was the best I could do at the time. It is not silly because I believed it. I am sure (or at least I hope) 12 years from now I will look at today’s definition of my successful life and think it is incomplete, vague, and needing growth.

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