This Is 28

Goodbye, 27 – this is 28. The first hours of 28, I should say, navigating the oppressive humidity that clings to the inside of the apartment even as the thunder clouds gather across the sky. 

It’s a funny thing – no matter where I am in the world, it always seems to thunderstorm on my birthday, for as long as I can remember. A change in the seasons, perhaps, as spring curls into these early days of summer. 

At the end of 26, I told myself to take the paths I had yet to discover. I couldn’t have known then, with the world barely open, that I would do so in such a literal sense. That I would spend the last couple of months with my feet barely having time to touch the ground as I moved from place to place, exploring winding streets and unknown places. 

I couldn’t have known, how different my life would look now compared to this time last year. That I would be facing down a summer that is as familiar as it is not. That I would finally be in some semblance of a stable career, even as I think carefully on what the years to come will look like.

When I was a teenager, I longed to be a grown-up: to escape out of my high school years and into adulthood. I felt that I was too old for the body I was in, that my mind was somewhere ahead of the present moment. Come my early twenties, I felt the opposite: I felt as though I was still eighteen years old and stumbling my way through something called adulthood, with no sense of what I was doing.

For maybe the first time in my life, I feel exactly the age I am. Not too old, not too young, but just right. A sheer sense of contentment in myself and who I am that, only a few years ago, would have felt impossible. 

I think back on the person I was when I was travelling. Confident, and inquisitive, and adaptable. It’s the person I have learned to be on the road but that I forget to bring with me into my daily life at home. But that is the person I want to inhabit in every part of my life. There is no need to lose my sense of adventure just because I am not in some far-flung place; no reason not to learn and discover and explore any more at home than I do away. 

As I take my first steps into this next year of my life, I’m willing to let the path unfold as it will, knowing that this time – maybe, for the first time – I’m exactly where I’m meant to be.