Reeling
Today I came to realize the difference between 22 and 18. And it's not 4 years, it's the innocence I've lost in those 4 years.
I know it sounds stupid, but I feel somehow less me than I was 4 years ago. God, it seems like an age. The gulf of my years adrift in the same place divides the me now from the me then, and the distance traveled is what separates us. I haven't gone very far (geographically), but I've gone a long way. When I was 18 I had no clue how ignorant I was, and somehow it got me through until life (not so subtly) informed me otherwise. I keep thinking about my "promise", you know, that set of things you think you can do when you are just graduated from HS. You think you can break through walls, you think you can do anything, and the worst part of it is that you're right; and you know it. But what you don't know when you're 18 is that there's a price. You don't quite comprehend (no matter how often you're told) that life has a way of extracting a price and leaving you with less of that enthusiasm than you started.
Somehow I'm still the meandering, unfocused me I was 4 years ago, but somehow I'm not. I still have a motivation "problem" when it comes to school, I'm still kind of a prick, and some good people still seem to call themselves my friends (which I don't understand, really). I'm still not socially adept. I'm not a "people person", unless they are "my" people. I guess the thing that got me thinking about all of this was my realization that part of becoming a craftsman involves seeing deeper into a process (or feeling a need to) or project than I did before. It gives me something in caution that I didn't have before. It keeps me from making expensive mistakes. But sometimes I think that it's not always for the better.
I wish I still had the time to make expensive mistakes and not know it.