Regarding My Twenty-Eight-Year-Old Self

I was filling out a job application this morning—and the various irritations and outbursts coming with that activity are the content of another blog post some other time—and during the process I was required to list the expiration date of my driver’s license.  Gamely I pulled the little card with its thuggish self-portrait out of my wallet, and I was struck by the year that I saw.  2018.  Two thousand and eighteen.  It’s only six years away, but it might have been sixty for the amount of thought I’ve put into that date. 

All my life, I’ve been dreaming about this year, 2012.  Well, not all my life.  As a child I didn’t care what year it was, and what an enviable position that is.  Then, upon entering middle school, the year 2008 was the pinprick of light in the distance: high school graduation.  Once that came, I celebrated myself vaguely for a while, then set my sights on the next level of achievement.  Ever since then, my only goal has been May 2012—simply to make it that far, to survive the work and the trouble and the life to be lived, so to obtain that moment of glory in my college education.  And this morning it occurs to me, with a mild sense of panic, that this moment is gone.

What do I dream about now?  For me, an abstract, hopeful kind of dream is just not enough.  I need to know what I’m looking at, to be aware of what’s coming.  But where will I be in six years?  Driving my son to preschool, my baby daughter to the doctor for a checkup?  Flying out of Korea at the end of my most recent worldwide book tour?  Living in a box somewhere in the intestines of the world?  Or still sitting on this pull-out bed in my parent’s sitting room?  (Heaven forbid: much as I love my family, I’d rather take the box.  At least it would make a good story.)

I just don’t know.  I have no idea.  And it occurs to me that most people live their lives this way.  Oh, sure, we most of us have a reasonable certainty where we will be, and things like a house, a job, a family, tie us down a bit more.  But I, having none of these things, am floating untethered in outer space.  No bonds, which  means no boundaries.  And I don’t know whether to be thrilled or terrified.

So I write this now for the curious, perhaps settled, and probably wiser self who will come back in June of 2018: Don’t forget this feeling.  Don’t forget that anything can happen, because you can make anything happen.  Laugh at your wild ideas about the future, because I’m sure none of them will be true.  And smile at the thought that once you were afraid of the world, because by this time, you’ll know enough about to face it with equanimity.  Best of luck to me, and to you, too, because you, of course, have your own problems to deal with.

Oh, and please don’t freak about turning thirty in two years.  It is NOT A BIG DEAL.