Today is the first day of my 39th year of post-uterine life on this planet. This means that it’s 365 days until I hit 40. Yikes.
It is common, I suppose, to start looking backwards at this time in a persons life. I suppose this because it is something I find myself more and more tempted to do. This is, in my opinion, a mistake. It I were to summarize each decade of my life according to my overall impression of what happened to me during that time, I would say this:
First Decade (0-10): Formation of core identity and interests.
Second Decade (11-20): Transformation into immature, nascent adult.
Third Decade (21-30): School of hard knocks, transformation into actual adult.
Fourth Decade (31-40): Establishment of stable, functional, adult life.
I now know who I am, what I believe, and what I’m doing. I know my strengths and weaknesses and I know how to leverage the former and have systems to attempt to compensate for the latter. This is a good place to be in. It took, perhaps, more time than it ought to have taken. I believe that this is in large part due to the negative influence of my religious upbringing, as it shunted me down life paths that I would not have ventured down otherwise and kept me from things I could have benefited from. But, such is life. I am still young, I am still strong, and if my personal development was somewhat unusual, there is nothing I can do about it now but shrug and carry on. Which is precisely what I intend to do.