I feel like my face has changed. Has it aged? There’s something different I can’t put my

I feel like my face has changed. Has it aged? There’s something different I can’t put my finger on. I hate my hair less, I hate my cheeks less. I look in the mirror, and there’s something different, and it’s been different for a little while now. For the last week I’ve felt like this, and I’ve started wondering if it’s that age now, that age where I feel ok about myself, feel more comfortable in my skin. I pray that that time has come, and that it’s not just a phase that will end in a month. I feel I feel I feel I have changed, almost as if I can see past the eyes and inside too, past the changed outside into the changed inside. I hear things I say, I listen to the thoughts I think, and in those moments, clear as day, I know I have changed a lot again. Not the kind of changing we do every day, that change that happens very slowly and gradually as we grow older, but the rare sudden change, where things seem to accumulate and bear their weight down on you in your sleep, and upon your waking you find your skin thicker, your eyes wiser, your mind more aware, your posture straighter. It has happened to me a couple of times before. And when it does, I always know, it never takes me by surprise, it never takes me more than a day to feel it, to know that something in the air around me has shifted, that something in me has disappeared and made way for something new. I wonder, before I go to sleep, how many people I have been in my life, and how many more I’ll be. Change is one of the most beautiful things to me. I’m always open to it, I never stop wanting to change, I never stop wanting things around me to change, for life to change. Not because who I am or what life is like doesn’t seem good enough to me, not because of any negative feelings, but only because I am so thirsty for all of it. I want a thousand lives, a thousand happy nights, a thousand different views. I don’t want to be the same person every day of my life, just like I don’t want to wear the same pair of shoes every day. I don’t want to be strong every day. I don’t want to be understanding every day. I don’t want to be selfish every day, but I don’t want to spend the rest of my life being selfless. I want to keep going, on and on, change and evolve. I want to let myself be afraid, and wake up the next day and be strong, be strong for the next week, month, year, ten years if need be, and when the time comes, and I am afraid again, I want to be afraid, and not pretend all is good just because I have been brave a thousand times before. And vice versa. I don’t want to know what will happen. I don’t want to know who I am. I don’t want a full stop. I’m ok not knowing. There are enough people in life trying to put us into boxes, trying to define us in three words, trying to make us into “poets”, “bankers”, “waitresses”, “accountants”, “housewives”, “idiots”. I’ll leave that to the rest of the world. I have no interest in just being three things. I have no interest in being the same person all my life, and doing the same things. I have no interest in going on a three month trip of “self-discovery” to someplace exotic or reading books about how to find your “true self”. Life is open ended, and you can discover yourself all you want, and have it all “figured out”, but if a big enough rock falls into the water you won’t be able to ignore the ripples. The moment we define something, it becomes only that thing, and ceases to be all else.

I would rather spend my whole life not knowing where I am going, than stand in one place for the rest of my days. I’m ok. I’m ok not knowing.