08/11/2026
I don’t even know this girl anymore… 21 years later.
I look at her and remember thinking she was grown. She had graduated high school. She had plans. She was closed and shy. She probably thought she knew exactly who she was and where life was going, but she wasn’t even touching the surface yet. She didn’t know how many versions of herself she would become to know. How many times life would completely rearrange her plans, how deeply she would love, how badly she would hurt, how many things she would build, lose, rebuild, fight for, outgrow, and eventually learn to let go of. At 18, you think growing up means finally getting to make your own decisions then you actually grow up and realize it’s learning how to live with those decisions. It’s discovering your boundaries and finding out what matters when everything that doesn’t matter gets stripped away. Learning that strength doesn’t happen all at once and doesn’t mean you’re never going to fall apart, it’s knowing how to put the pieces back together differently each time and that’s the strangest part about time. You spend your younger years trying so hard to figure out who you are, never realizing there isn’t one final version waiting for you. You just keep becoming, molding and evolving. I don’t even know the girl in this picture anymore but I know she had to exist for me to become who I am today.
