100 years

Twelve years ago yesterday, my family officially moved to our home in T-mec. Yesterday, my mom picked up the keys to the new house. Last Tuesday I spent fourteen hours in a car, drove through four states, and landed in Utah. Thursday I was on the road again by five a.m., and four hours later I was moving into my new apartment in Rexburg. It's amazing how much can change in short amounts of time, and how little over the span of years.
Change is good though. I'm not talking about promised change coupled with propaganda messages, I'm talking about growing up, moving on, developing into who you were always meant to be.
Growing up is hard, though; this I know. In packing up my bedroom back home, I filled an entire black trashcan (you know, the kind you put all your other trash bags into to wheel to the side of the street for the garbagemen?) with stuff from my room. There are three trashbags full of consignment stuff from me alone, and one is filled entirely with stuffed animals. There was a lot of trashing, and scarily, a handful of things saved for...wait for it...my future kids. Almost my entire life is packed into four or five boxes, two of which are filled with books. Everything else I own is up here at school with me, and all of it fits into an apartment shared by six girls.
I think growing up often means realizing what you can live without. It helps you eliminate the inessentials and think about what's important. One of those five boxes is filled with fragile pictures, teacups, and other heirlooms that represent the things I own of value. It's amazing how much we think we need until it comes time to downsize and get rid of it all.
We do that with our minds eventually, too. We think about the important things, we realize which memories we need to hold onto, which grudges we need to get rid of, and which "tough-stuff" things we finally need to accept and move on with.
I read an interesting blog entry from ThoughtCatalog, "A Checklist For The Age 19". It seemed appropriate, being nineteen myself. I really liked what the author had to say. My favorite, though, is the last on the list:

Every so often, you will need to scream. That’s okay. That’s allowed. Scream. After all, you’re just a kid. You’re only 19.

It's true, you know? I've been a legal adult for over a year now, but at the same time, I'm still a teenager. Once again, I'm the youngest in my apartment, but strangers trusted me with their lives for almost a thousand miles of driving. Before I turn twenty, I'm going to have an EMT license and will be trusted with people's lives from inside ambulances, but I still can't rent a car and I still call my mom almost daily.
I think 19 is the year to get it all out. To be a little bit more wild and rebellious than you have been and will be again. To start paying your own bills (if you haven't already). To really figure out what you're doing with life. I'm working on it, but I still have plenty of time. The thing is, I think nineteen is the time to realize that you don't always have plenty of time. Eventually, you'll be degree-less, jobless, and homeless if you don't realize that time runs out. Thank goodness mistakes are expected in this life. I would fail at being 19 otherwise.