#but being a late bloomer means subjecting everyone else to your new wisdom they probably already know

[lutethebodies]

That "how old were you in 2007" post has cycled into my feed for like the third time (thank you @coolseabird) so I think I'm meant to answer it now, but I won't do that via reblog. A cursory glance at the tags makes me think I'd be one of the older people to do so (I turned 31 that year), and some days I really can't do the "omg I'm so old" bit. I mean, I acquired a marriage and a mortgage that year—two purported bastions of adulthood I was absolutely not ready for—but nobody else will care about that and anyway that's not why I got hooked enough to post.

See, time and the passage of time fascinates me. My great-grandmother was born a few years before (or maybe after, I'm not sure) the battle of Little Bighorn. Before her life ended, she toured a nuclear submarine. That's bonkers. My dad once said to me "it's so strange that the Berlin Wall was put up when I was in 7th grade and came down when you were in 7th grade." I was born the day Carter was elected president and of course he just died at age 100, but the first things I remember from childhood (the L.A. Olympics, the Challenger explosion, the '84 US election) are probably ancient history now to anyone online (and I won't pretend that such USA-centric stuff matters to most of the world).

But for me this also goes beyond that relatively superficial macro trivia. I care about this in more of a personal way, like how "sometimes it seems pretty wild how much I've grown and changed from the person I was in any given past year." So much that I thought was important or that I felt obligated to care about—personally, professionally, socially, even globally—has fallen away and dissolved into irrelevancy. Sometimes that means I'll never be as worked up as others seem to be over the latest Current Discourse about anything. Sometimes that means what I consider Important And Relevant is dismissed as archaic garbage. At a certain point someone either accepts that or their brain breaks.

In any case the whole thing is a good reminder that none of us need to feel truly stuck as who we are in any given moment, or need to feel defined by anyone else's standards of what they think we should do or be, and nobody has any idea what our or their future will bring anyway. That might seem like something laughably easy to say—very nebulous and Hallmarky—but I feel like it can also be mentally liberating to those of us prone to fret and worry and what-if our way through life. We can either passively let life happen to us or we can actively try to shape how life happens to us. I feel like I'm a bit better at actively shaping it in 2025 at 48 than I was in, say, 2007 at 31.