A Series of Observations

I think it’s time to get beyond the stereotype that those above the age of 30 always know more than those in their 20’s do.

Let me be clear, I believe there is a lot of truth to it. I have no doubt that I’ll know more as I gather life experiences, but I like to think that maybe myself and many others my age understand the same truth about love and life and grief in a different light. That the benefit of aging is to be able to see my current position more clearly only because time took me away from it.

I was always the type of kid who craved adulthood. I thought I was much better suited to be an adult than I ever would be a kid. After all, youth to me was a Rubik’s cube I’d never have hope of solving, an endless maze of colors and disorganization that would never resolve clear and complete. 

I was very unlike my peers, and very much like them in so many ways. I hated partying and drinking (this hasn’t changed). I never understood the shallow forms of connection people were creating, and I always craved more from people who simply hadn’t made it to that depth yet.

It was a harsher reality to know that many never would.

Like them, I craved the sort of experiences I couldn’t put into words. The connection and happiness that we all thought came with having it all figured out. What set me apart was knowing how we were trying to do it in high school would simply never work.

Substances only succeeded at separating people further from the greater and deeper parts of themselves. It was the kind of high that kept everyone at arm’s length, and that was how everyone around me liked it. I continue to have no clue of the appeal.

Friends would leave my life over it. I was too interested in what was right or what my family expected of me to ever be the “fun friend.” There wasn’t much I could do about it then, and nothing I care to do about it now. Friends have been greater heartbreaks to me than boys have, and I’m grateful to have loved anyone so much.

Now, this isn’t going to be a sob story about how badly I wished my life had gone differently. I can see as I look back over my life so far that this was exactly what was meant to happen, whether I liked it or not. Most of the time I didn’t.

And that was when I learned to “zoom out.”

Over the course of my life thus far, that simple phrase rings in my mind a few dozen times a day.

I can still hear my mother each time I say it.

Zoom out.

She would say this as I picked at my skin in the mirror, when a boy wasn’t responding to my texts, when a friend would be distant, when I cried over my math homework, anything. It is probably the most amazing piece of advice my mother has ever given me, and it has stuck with me all this time.

There has never been an issue in my life where ‘zooming out’ hasn’t given me the perspective I needed. Now with the tools I learn in therapy and the arena that is life, I can have perspective and clarity. 

I’ll never know why people do or say the things they do, and maybe I don’t want to know, but all those things have led up to this life I continue to lead, a life I grow more proud of every day.

I hope we all learn how to Zoom Out, and perhaps together through this series we can.