Regression

A few months back, I found myself watching my friend's band play a high school show. The stage was set up in the hallway outside the cafeteria and the auditorium. It wasn't my old high school, but it was one I had hung out in before.

I was going through a rough patch at the time. My younger sister had just gotten engaged, and announced that she was pregnant. In contrast, I had just split up with my boyfriend of 3 years. And had a series of disappointing encounters with people of the opposite sex. It was all for the best, in the end, but it didn't make me feel any less lonely.

So I stood there, waiting for my friends to take the stage, and it hit me: this was exactly what I would have been doing on a Friday night at age 15.

Had I gone nowhere in 15 years? Did it show a remarkable lack of growth that I was doing the same things at 30 that I had done when I was half that age? It was a very depressing idea at the time.

Look back now, months later, I prefer to look at it differently. Perhaps it's not that I haven't moved forward with my life. Maybe I knew myself so well back then, that I didn't have to change.