Best Year

It's 3am.  I've been up since 2am.  It sucks to have middle of the night insomnia, but what makes it worse, you ask?  The raging hunger!  I could totally eat ANYthing right now.  Of course, you're not supposed to eat ANYthing this late/early, so I suppose I will drown my hunger pains with water and pretend it's something more delectable.

The question posed a few days ago was: "What was the best year of your life?"  It's been in the back of my mind, and unfortunately it's turned out to be process of elimination.  If you've read this blog for any length of time, you can pick up on my sentiment that I didn't enjoy being a kid.  My mother was extremely moody and difficult to live with & I moved around a lot and it was draining to start over all the time.  I was always provided for as a kid & my mother was responsible, so it's not like it was awful.  It just wasn't great.

I'd want to say college because I did really like the college experience.  It was more like it was a social learning experience (who should you befriend, date, etc. - all through trial and error), and it was an exciting and confusing time.  As much as I liked it, I didn't feel completely centered throughout the experience.  There definitely were many moments of insecurity and hesitance and confused identity that took away from the experience.  But I suppose that's why it was so worthwhile.

Unlike many people, I enjoy being an adult.  I like choosing where I want to live, being able to control my life more than when I was a kid.  I'm very fortunate to have not run into a whole lot of huge problems in my life thus far, so I've found it manageable.  I consciously try not to get in over my head (although that doesn't always work), and I've found a partner who I genuinely enjoy and love.  I like how I spend my work time.  I enjoy having a toddler and teaching her about the world.  The freedom to make the life you want as an adult is extremely appealing, and most of the time I will say that I enjoy being an adult far better than a kid.  As a kid, I had a tremendous amount of responsibility but little to no control.  If I'm going to have all the responsibility, then I want to have it on my terms. 

So I will say that the best year of my life is April 1999 - March 2000 when I was 21-22.  In that year, we bought our first house and chose to legally be together by getting married.  Those were the first big things we did as adults, and we tried to thoughtfully tackle both of those big decisions.  It's funny now that if I meet anyone in their early or even mid 20s now who is buying a house or getting married, I think, "But they're so young..."  I'm a complete hypocrite because I was usually even younger than they are when I did those things!  21 just seems so young now when I'm 32 although I must say that I don't think I've changed a whole lot since I was 21. 

I've been reading a lot this week.  I am making some good progress on the Dewey project.  I think I'm going to have to take a Dewey break soon because I'm starting to burn out even though I'm reading some interesting and diverse books.