I'm not keeping these things secret

Eventually, we are all one day invited into this adult world that our parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents have all been a part of - it seems - their entire lives. But we are confused as we're pulled in to this world where everything costs no-one anything and we are no longer "compelled to do what we must", but whatever we like.

A world where every moment we choose our own destiny, selfishly. Where bills and weekend determine our days and schedules someone else decides determine our lives. This world where we're so confoundedly busy, all of the time. A world where no-one knows why or where all of the time is going anymore. A world that never made any sense, and somehow still doesn't.

This world of adults is making me come to some serious decisions - making me come to new conclusions. Making me see that no-one makes my life but me. That I'm never stuck.

As Rob Bell - or Rob Bell's friend puts it: that no matter where or why I am where or why I am, I don't have to live like that.

This world is not my home.

Things that, as a child, seemed so cliched are slowly and suddenly starting to make themselves more clear to me in this adult world.

This is the time when patters evolve, when everyone else is getting around to settling into the groove that will determine the rest of their lives.

I am beginning to see that I am, too.

We've got a motto we're now defining, a pattern we're suddenly deciding, a ritual we're clearly designing. Because, here - we're at the start, at the place where this adult world gets its designations. And we're the ones making the calls.

It's our time now.

Our holidays. Our sisters and our brothers and our parents making up the aunts and the uncles and the grandparents that we've always thought existed all along. It's our traditions and our words and our ways of life that the young ones will remember. It's our past that will be their history. It's us that defines the family.

I've only felt this old once before. And then, I stopped growing for the next four years. I was sixteen and it was Missouri. I wasn't a child anymore, and I felt it. I was beginning to see the world through new eyes. Eyes I closed after that moment for four years, trying to change someone else's eyes. Only to be awakened at the end and find that it was the first day of seventeen again, and in the past years - I had gotten nowhere.

This year has been similar in ways; Hard. But we knew it was going to be.

Easy is bullshit.

So now, I'm starting to see. I'm twenty-four and my eyes are finally wide open. We're almost one year old and our heart, finally, is wide open.

We're going to go test the world and see how badly it can fail.
And when it does, we'll start all over again. Because that's what we are. That's just what we do.

We're test strips in this world, and we will tell it how it's going.

So from here on out, I am air: with no past and an infinite future; and I am ash: with an infinite past and no future. And I am Lennix: with an indefinite beginning and a clear transformation; and I am Ashenden: with an inherited beginning and an open transformation.

From here, I am grown.
From here, I am growing.