Every once in a while I read the blog of Caitlin's little cousin Justine who just started college and is away from home and on her own for the first time and it makes me remember the days when I, well, started to grow up.
It's a strange phase.
I think it's mostly the years between (approximately) 16 and 20 when you suddenly discover new things in your life. I started to read 'adult' books, went to see old black and white movies at the cinema or taped pretty much every independent movie they showed. I started to develop my taste in music and basically... yeah, I thought I was cool. In an intellectual way, but still. There was a time in life when watching 'Jules et Jim' and listening to Paula Cole and liking it made me an adult.
Except that it didn't.
Looking back I think that maybe it's also the time when we are most deceived by ourselves. The strange years between a sheltered home and our first well-paid job, when we think that we must be grown-up now because we are not children anymore, when we think that we know the world and most of all who we are.
Looking back on who I was then I knowingly smile at that girl who didn't have a clue about the world. But maybe that was the reason why she was so damn happy back then. She lived a lovely lie that didn't harm anyone, expecially since everyone around lived the same lovely 'I-go-to-university-therefore-I-am-grown-up' lie.
Looking in the mirror at who I am now I feel forever wise and forever stupid at the same time.
Forever wise because the last years were full of real life crap. Crap that I had to put up. Crap that made me miserable. Crap that made me angry at the world. Crap that made me cry. Crap that made me afraid. But, most of all, crap that made me strong and a tiny little bit wiser.
Forever stupid because I grow more aware of all the mistakes I have made and of all the things that I thought back then that turned out to be just wrong. Stupid also, because as I grow older I understand that there will always be more to not know than to know.
I remember an incident when I still lived in Bonn. I was sitting in the streetcar on my way to the station and there were a bunch of teenage kids sitting all around me, throwing things around. When one of the boys nearly hit me with whatever that was (nothing dangerous anyway) a girl shouted at him: 'You nearly hit the woman!'
I was only in my early twenties, but I was a woman to them. I was officially another generation. In other words: old.
