I’m not old. I know that. By any regular view of the world, I’m right on track with the normal pace of life. I’m 22. I just graduated college. I’m starting a career…soon. Sometimes, though, when my google reader gets to zero, and there’s nothing but bad romantic comedy marathons on television, and I get to facebook stalking some of my old high school friends, I start to feel like I missed out on some giant life shift in the last four years when everyone else became a kind of adult, and I stayed the same. 

Well, that’s not entirely true. I am world’s different than I was in high school, but my changes have been mental. I’ve gained confidence. I’ve learned about myself. I’ve kind of figured out what I want in life. A lot of my high school friends, however, in just four years, have gotten engaged, bought houses, gotten married, and had babies. I feel like I just saw them. I feel like I was just singing next to them in the spring musical,  going with them on midnight runs to Steak and Shake, gossiping with them about our English teacher, and sometimes, I feel like (no, I know that) I’m STILL doing these kinds of things. I feel like they are living lives that I can no longer relate to in any way, like they’re adults, and I’m still this weird teenager-young adult hybrid.  

Not that I want their lives. A lot of them are still living in their hometowns or some remote suburb just like it. Most of them have jobs like cosmetologist, army wife, or fast food restaurant assistant manager – not that these aren’t respectable choices, but they are just not where I see or want my life going, so it’s not jealously I’m feeling. I just…I don’t know… find it so weird that in four short years, all of our lives have taken this ridiculously drastic turn away from each other. We were all the same. We all related to one another. We all hung out, and now I’m living at home after finishing college, planning on moving to West LA to live with my gay best friend, while my former classmate is in a hospital praying with her Navy officer husband for their 16-week-premature baby. (I found their blog about him via facebook – if you want to keep him in your thoughts.)

All my friends aren’t in this situation. I certainly have a lot of high school friends still in college. I have friends who have moved or are about move to New York and LA, and friends who are single and loving it. It’s just easier for me to process their situations, because we are all still on the same level, in the same place. To me, they are normal. It’s hard for me to process marriage when I haven’t had a boyfriend for more than 3 months…ever. It’s hard for me to process having babies when I minorly freaked out at the thought of babysitting a 13-month old. It’s hard for me to feel like I have all the time in the world to get married and have babies when it seems more and more people already have. When did this happen? When did all these people I know as teenagers become adults? One day, we were all the same, and the next, I feel like I don’t even know who these people are anymore. 

I think what’s especially weird for me is my parents were those people – those people I in no way relate to. They were married and moving to Oklahoma for my dad to start his time in the Marine Corps at 22. I’M 22! Does that mean I’m an adult now, too? Maybe that’s the whole problem…