twentytwelve: something greener?

the thing about twentyeleven is that it was a year of major change. more than that: it was the year that i bid my childhood good-bye and embarked on the train to adulthood, and responsibility. it was the year that i said good-bye to high school and hello to college. and the thing about going off to college is that it means your life is going to change. completely. i mean, you go from living in your parents' (or your dorm parents', for you other boarding school kids) home to a dorm room. you go from being dependent on your parents for everything, from your meals to your clothes to your rides to school, to having to decide for yourself where to eat and what to spend your money on. and of course there's the whole matter of go-to-college-become-instantly-poor that's affecting every financial decision you make. the summer between your senior year of high school and your freshman year of college is your last chance to be a kid. it's the last time you'll be able to just be carefree with life; after that, you're in charge, you have to make the decisions: you're an adult.

so i think it's safe to say that for those of us who graduated high school in twentyeleven it became a year of change. there's no way to get around the fact that last year was one in which everything changed. and it's also safe to say that most people don't like change. oh, we might like to sit around at home and dream of a time, maybe ten or fifteen years down the road, when everything will be different. we like to close our eyes and picture ourselves at age thirty, wildly successful in our highly lucrative career, with an adoring husband (wife if you happen to be a boy) who lives to serve us, and two or three adorable children who are perfect angels. or maybe you're the starving artist type, who pictures yourself living in some drafty garret somewhere lost in the middle of new york or london or paris, plying your craft and living on stale crackers and lofty dreams. either way, we all like to imagine what life will be like when it all changes. but when it actually comes down to the nitty gritty of change, it kind of sucks. it's much less glamorous and much more...tiresome. it has less to do with success being handed to you on a silver platter than it does with hard work and slowly improving until you reach the point you've dreamed of. (we all just wish we could skip the work and jump ahead to when we're "thirty, flirty, and thriving"). but it doesn't work that way. someday we wake up and realize that we'll never reach that point unless we go through the slow process of change, and it's more like being skinned alive than it is ripping off a band-aid.
all this to say, twentyeleven, for me at least, was the year that the slow process of being skinned alive began. and i will be the first to sit in my room and tell myself how much i like change and how i can't wait to be "all grown up." i'll also be the first to run screaming back to bed at my first glimpse of what growing up really looks like.

that said, it doesn't seem like i should be holding onto twentyeleven at all, does it? i should have been leaping forward into twentytwelve, screaming "hallelujah, the year of the torturous beginnings of change is behind me, let's move forward into the glorious new dawn of beauty!", all while sprinkling daisies behind me, possibly into a field of shining green grass underneath a sky as blue as the sea, accompanied by the sweet sweet trilling of birds. and yet, oddly enough, that's not what happened. instead i found myself clinging to the tree at the edge of the meadow, the one with "2011" carved into it, holding on for dear life while the great winds of change pulled at me and sought to toss me unceremoniously into twentytwelve. needless to say, the winds succeeded in tearing me away from twentyeleven, so here i sit, firmly planted at the beginning of twentytwelve. and you see, the reason i didn't want to leave twentyeleven is because, while the latter part of it was a year of change, the beginning still held the last shreds of my childhood. and as soon as i dipped my first toe into the waters of almost-adulthood, i realized two things: that i was undeniably excited about growing up and having a future, and that i was irrevocably tied to my childhood and terrified of leaving it behind. confusing, right?

so while i should be looking forward to twentytwelve with great hopefulness to the future, i'm still looking back at twentyeleven and twentyten and all the years before that, years that are filled with pictures of my childhood. because this year, i'm  not just growing up. i'm not just stepping into the world of adulthood, i'm actually leaving my childhood behind, in another country. almost all of my memories and lessons are housed in that other country, and i have to leave it and walk into another one. and that scares me so much that i'm tempted to turn and jump into bed and hold on for dear life and swear i'll never leave. but i can't really do that, now can i? i have to be mature and grow up, because while my past is in that country, my future, for the moment, lies somewhere else, and how will i ever meet it if i don't step forward now and grasp it?

they say the grass is always greener on the other side. i don't think that's the problem, though. i think the problem is just that we can't be on both sides at once. the grass isn't greener on either side; it's just a different shade, and we want both shades because they're both good, but we're only allowed to have one at once. and that, my friends, is why i think we hate change so much, and why i am so reluctant to blaze forward into twentytwelve. but then i know that i'll never get anything accomplished if i keep looking backward. i have to move forward, eyes on the horizon, and every once in a while i can glance back at where i've come from, just to make sure i'm still going in a straight line.