Cate Crafter

Just a fair warning this is a little…shall we say bleak? No, Jaded… well not exactly but let’s just say it’s not exactly brimming with positive energy…read at your peril…

Just kidding, no harm will come to you from reading this, it is purely just the musings of a girl, I mean woman, who is a little lost and very conflicted with growing older and becoming a whole different age bracket on surveys.

Turning 25 is surreal, a quarter of a century has already passed and yet it feels like it has been but a short moment. A blink of an eye if you will. I guess everyone feels this way at some point in their life. But, for me right now I feel a rather strong discontent with turning 25. I feel like I am still trying to become the person I am meant to be, and I am still building a future I have no true solid plans for. Am I just wandering and living aimlessly? Will I ever know my direction in life?

Is a quatre life crisis such a thing? And that’s me bravely assuming that I will become a centenarian! Perhaps I am not overreacting and turning 25 is a difficult time for many. My proof, of course, comes from literature the voracious reader within me always finds quotes from books that mirror my exact situation. I came across this short Story from Korean Author Bae Suah called Highway with Green Apples, the line as follows struck a chord with me.

I am one week away from my twenty-fifth birthday. I hate being that age. That age is neither as fresh and full of life as fifteen years nor as jaded as the afternoon of thirty-five years.

Besides the eeriness of the timing (I read this exactly within the week before I was due to turn 25 and the book begins in autumn, thus the protagonist like me has a birthday in Autumn), this line sums up the confusion of turning 25. Betwixt youth and maturity, 25 is an age where you assume that you should have everything in order. But assumption often falls flat and while maybe the average 25-year-old may have direction or feel at ease with themselves, there will be an awful lot of us in the opposite position, lost and confused.

So…20 years separate these two pictures, 1998 to 2018. I have changed quite a lot but still, the person in the second picture is unmistakably the little girl of the first. Looking back over pictures brings so much to the foreground, its a reminder that we change but we also stay the same, it’s a reminder that time has passed and perhaps they are…a wake-up call? Live like there is no tomorrow as for all you know one day you will wake up and 20 years have flown by…

Now, to put an end to this rather deflating and rather bleak outlook, I need to insert some positive thinking in here somewhere. If you’re still with me, thank you for being patient and reading this far, time to change the tone…

I have learnt a lot about myself in these 25 years, I like Learning Languages, Movies and Literature. I drink too much coffee. My favourite seasons are Spring and Autumn. I think too much about how other people perceive me (something I’m working on), and I have an insatiable desire to travel the world (also something I’m working on). I value logic but emotions rule me sometimes. I believe in love but feel that a true incarnation is hard to find. I believe that I am rather self-aware but rather frustratingly I am still struggling to find my place in this vastly beautiful and richly diverse world. But maybe someday soon I will find where my me shaped puzzle piece fits. And until that day I will continue to learn about and learn to love myself.