It was exhausting always worrying about global humiliation. I’m on the road to recovery now though

**Spoiler Alert**

You are awesome.

**End of Spoiler Alert**

I have now reached the age when rumor has it that all of my past poor choices catch up with me and I begin to fall apart (did I really think that it was a good idea to NOT wear sunscreen, for real?).  I never believed it was a ‘real thing’ but slap my ass and call me a converted believer because it is all TRUE.

I wish that I could sit down with my 16 year-old self (after apologizing profusely to my parents for not believing them, and even, *gasp* laughing at their wisdom) and after giving some very concrete examples of the badness that would be coming my way (aches and pains, lines and dimples, jiggles, wiggles, lumps and bumps – the usual “your shit is falling apart, ‘yo ” happiness), kick the living holy hell out that know-it-all adolescent me (just for good measure, I have always been on the wrong side of stubborn) until I learned to appreciate

1) the gifts and talents that I had (have) and nurture those gifts;

2) who I was as a person, in relation to myself and others (am);

3) what I had (have) to offer and learned to stop worrying what people thought (think) about me because, as it turns out, they were (are) not thinking about me, they were (are) too busy thinking and worrying about themselves;

4) how I looked (look) and felt (feel) and;

5) the people in my life for who they were (are).

If I could go back and get my sixteen-year-old self to understand just those five things, how much different would I be today?  How different would my life be? Better?  Worse?  I have no idea.  At the end of the day, would I really change anything about where I am and what I have today?  NO.  Not for anything would I change where I am and what I have in my life today. But I would like to be healthier and have more energy so that I could better appreciate and enjoy all of my life blessings.

Fortunately for me, while my chronological age continues to climb at the required Mayan calendar intervals, my maturity age is learning-delayed, more accurately mildly retarded, so in reality I still have lots of some time to get myself on track and stop the decline.

So, seeing as my uber-slammin’ DeLorean and waste-powered flux capacitor are in the shop  future do not actually exist (and yes, my reference point are suck in the 80’s, thankyouverymuch), my sixteen-year-old self will so remain, frozen in time and blissful in her agonizing ignorance.

It turns out that the world isn’t watching me, the world doesn’t know who I am.  I am free to make mistakes, make a fool of myself, to say what I think, what I want, and to fuck some serious shit up and there will not be global and eternal repercussions.  What a freeing feeling to not live in fear of creating skeletons who could one day leap from the closet and sink your battleship.  What a truly liberating realization.  Knowing it now is almost as good as knowing it always.

A friend of mine from adolescence recently shared this on her Facebook wall and for some reason, for whatever reason, it spoke volumes to me.  So I’m sharing it with you just in case it speaks to you as well.

Thanks for the reminder, P.B. 🙂