As I trudge along through the day-to-day grind, I've noticed something. I think I'm pretty glad that things have worked out the way they have for me. I know that a lot of people might look at my life and think "Holy cow, she's almost 30 and still single? What's wrong with her?" but to me, I think that's been a blessing. A lot of my friends took the "Jump Right into the Next Chapter" approach in life...graduate high school, go straight to college, graduate from college, get married immediately, start cranking out babies. Although I know that many of them were happy with the decisions that they made and felt as though those decisions were right for them, I know that they would have been wrong for me. And it's pretty clear that they were wrong for a lot of them, too. I think society really puts this pressure on young people to hurry up and get everything in life over with and if you don't do that, then surely there is something wrong with you. Every year, I see more and more of my friends that are my age getting divorced after just a few short years of marriage, many with new babies and new mortgages and personally, I'd rather have stayed single.
I know beyond a shadow of a doubt had I jumped into any kind of relationship at any of those stages in my life, I would be a lonely, lonely girl today! At 18 when I graduated high school, I was a shy, quiet, bookworm with no confidence, bad fashion choices and even worse hair. By the time I graduated college, I was loud, outgoing, boistrous, silly, crude when the occassion called for it and sort of thought that the world owed me everything. Granted, my hair and fashion choices had improved. There was still room for work, though. In the seven years (good God) since I graduated college, I'm even different still. I know that I will never plateau, but I'm pretty sure all my hormone-driven, dramatic personality changes have probably mellowed at this point. And my clothes and hair are awesome. If such a man existed that could have weathered all that with me and still wanted to hold my hand at the end of the day, I never found him!
But, whenever these thoughts don't comfort me and I decide to take a day or two to feel sorry for myself, I try to remember that I don't just want some ho-hum life. I don't want to look back and think I did everything right in line with everybody else and just lived a boring, snooze-fest existence. I want a fantastic, magical story in life, love and everything in between. I want people to be like "Wow, that Melanie lived it up!" And if it takes me another thirty years to find that fabulous storyline that is worth writing home about, then I'll wait. If it's half as good as what I've imagined than it is well worth it!
