Debbie

 Scrolling through Instagram (a habit I need to break!), I ran into a reel about good old turn of the Millennium music. "When you thought you would be Stacey's mom but realize you are Debbie."

The woman in the reel is singing along to Bowling for Soup's 1985 and then slows down as she realizes she is Debbie. "Debbie just hit the wall! She never had it all. One Prozac a day... Husband's a CPA. Her dreams went out the door when she turned 24...."

I'm not a perfect fit for that but wow. Middle age is just around the corner for me these days. I looked up when the song came out. 2004, 19 years after 1985. Here we are 19 years after that. I'm not obsessed with past culture like Debbie but sometimes it takes my breath away to realize how much time has gone by since college. I lived in Provo for 9 years and it felt like a long time. I realized recently that I've been back in Colorado for 8 years now, and it feels like a blink of an eye. Time is weird like that.

I'm relating more and more to middle aged characters on TV and in books too, which is weird! I kept reading young adult stuff for so long because at least it was clean, but now I'm much more Haymitch than Katniss. 

Life is hard. When you are young, you have big dreams. Of course you do. You should! You focus on the positive things you will experience in life. You don't know what challenges will hit and if you worried about them in advance it wouldn't help anyways.

Part of middle age seems to be accepting that no one has a perfect life, that things didn't go the way you hoped. Understanding that you don't need to be jealous of anyone else because no one gets through this life without some kind of suffering.

I've been through things that I didn't expect. It was excruciating for me to be single until I was 30. That sounds dramatic but I'm sure anyone reading this knows me well enough to remember how devastated I was when Prince Charming was delayed. Since then things have just been harder. I've gone through things I never thought I'd have to in my worst dreams and I have the PTSD to prove it. (I really need to get back in treatment for that....) I have a lot of friends facing serious health challenges right now, some of them life threatening. Some of my friends' little children are facing serious challenges. Some of my friends have already lost a parent or even both of them. Some of them are struggling financially and some can't seem to land a good job no matter how hard they work. I still have wonderful, beautiful, talented friends my age who have yet to have their first kiss or date their first boyfriend, things we dreamed of together as young teenagers decades ago. Others are waiting for their turn to become mothers and bring home a little baby of their own.

Life is messy and complicated. That is how it is meant to be. Somehow we have to find joy in the journey and figure out how to use the time we are given. I think of Anna in the New Testament, widowed for the majority of her life, so she chose to spend her years serving in the temple. I want to be like her and put my life to the best use that I can, even when it doesn't look the way I thought it would.