Wherever you go, There you are

 It used to be that the mere idea of being late made my chest seize up and my stomach drop. I have so many memories of begging my mom to “hurry up, let’s go!” because I was afraid that I would arrive late to school. If she was even 2 minutes late picking me up at the end of the day, I would automatically assume she had perished in a horrific car accident and that I would never see her again. 

(As a licensed mental health professional it is bizarre to look back on my childhood and realize just how many criteria I met for an anxiety disorder, but that is for another entry.)

As a young adult, I would arrive an hour early (not an exaggeration) to things like job interviews, doctors appointments, and social events, only to wait in my car for most of that time and then casually walk into the building in the last 5 minutes before the engagement started, like I’d only just arrived. 

Some of the gripping anxiety likely had to do with the loss of control that comes with being late - and, at least for me, the fear of who I would seem to everyone else if I didn’t show up on time. Would they assume that I’m incompetent, a mess, that I didn’t care about them or respect them? Even on the rare occasion that something legitimate made me run a few minutes behind, that became a moment of icy panic about my failure as a reliable person. 

This morning, I was running late due to traffic because someone in my lane had gotten into an accident. And instead of panicking, as I sat in my car at a total standstill, I thought “Oh well. They can wait on me at work.” 

Found a lovely little (BIG) community, addme, and was floored reading through the introduction posts of members who were all either my age or substantially older than me. I didn’t realize this was something I needed, but… I think it’s something I’ve needed.

I’ll wager a guess that most of my issues related to aging are similar to others’. That feeling of running out of time. Of wishing I was 10x (read: 10000000x) more competent at everything I do because I’m freaking 30 years old already, so what’s my excuse?

Clarification: I would contend that I’m pretty damn amazing at most things I do. I’m a licensed counselor and I’m stellar professionally. I know this without colleagues and clients giving me feedback (although I get that quite often, too) - I’m doing what I was meant to do. I believe I’m a skilled artist, and I’m an emotional, brilliant writer. I’ve worked quite hard at all of these things. The weight I carry in this regard is more that I know I’m great but that great is a nebulous concept defined by the individual, and I say I can always be greater, more capable, more skilled. Usually I’m not acutely aware of the bar I set for myself, more that I just have this feeling that, oooh, it’s just out of reach - but if I jump one more time, I can get there! and then it’s always a centimeter too high every consecutive time. It’s not demoralizing, strangely - more like adrenaline-laced. Like, woah, when I come out the other side, what will I have that I didn’t have before? How will I have grown? What will that me be like?

Anyhow. There’s something about sinking slowly into someone else’s journal entries - the minutia of their lives, all those little mundane, sensory details. It’s comforting. It’s real. Especially someone who is older than me, because it really pushes me to slow myself and put things into perspective. Makes me reconsider the meaning I make of things. To be mindful of the abundance of beautiful, precious, normal, redundant moments in my own life, with a greatness all their own.