Growing

On M's part, she is indeed growing and learning. Her latest entry on her blog (aptly called GROWING) says it well.

Between the innocently ignorant ages of 14 and 16 I prided myself on my inability to cry, extrapolating from it some sense of strength. Nowadays even James Bond films make me tear up, and every time I do, I remember that version of myself, the one with the bluster and the bold illusion of certainty. I like to think that I hold a menagerie of these past selves within me, and I carry them with me wherever I go. From the 9-year-old desperate to get her hands on a computer so she could furiously type, to the 12-year-old willing herself to grow up, to the 19-year-old discovering that she was much less of a hero than she once imagined. Feelings are just feelings and sometimes the old ones still well up and catch me off guard. When I’m sitting cold and hunched over on the floor. The key difference though, now, is me. I laugh at my hot messes and I tell them as stories to friends at the pub. I stay at the party until it becomes fun; I give myself a chance. I eat when I’m hungry and sometimes when I’m full. I take myself out to movies and I take pride in my clothes. I stop running when I feel tired and I remember to breathe. And when I’m feeling low, as the moods come and go, I know it’s all part of the journey I’m on.

Every day I’m learning and burning, I’m unlearning and discerning.

I try to let the sights and sounds of it all pass me by, noticing without latching on. The full moon tonight is shrouded in a halo of light, outshone by the yellow glow of the streetlamp along Walton Street. One golden leaf dangles and drops from the tree, silent and solitary until it disappears among the carpet of autumn beneath my feet.