I’m always surprised by how much people change in their late teens and 20s, because I did not. Not very much, anyway. Sometimes it seems the person is completely different, completely renovated, from 15 to 25 and if you knew them in adolescence, you don’t know them in their mid-20s.

Then I realize that I did nearly all of that changing from when I was about 8 or 9 to 13 or so.

The bildung of my own life has never matched anyone else’s I’ve ever known, and thus when people tell me “what’s going to happen,” it has never made any sort of sense to me as I’d already well passed the milestones and thoughts they’d set for me. I must’ve seemed so strange, so removed and odd, to my peers and to my teachers. I know I did,  but even stranger than I realized then I think.

I’ve got so many examples of that, and I don’t really feel like explicating them all in this post.

However, a brief one is that I knew by the time I was 10 years old that I didn’t want to have any children. Since I  am not much different than I was at 10, that conviction has not changed in the least despite people (oh so many people) assuring me that it definitely would.