A Brief Note on Getting Older: This Dog's Had its Day

Growing up is not something I've taken kindly to. I sleep with 3x more stuffed animals now than I did when I was a child. I insist on taking all the things I don't like out of anything I eat and piling them on a side plate. There was that time when someone I was living with bought an apartment, and I freaked out at the adultness of it all and bought a tandem bike. I have been called 'refreshingly childlike' in a professional context. I don't know how refreshing it is, perhaps at times mildly infuriating, but childlike is, in many ways, quite accurate.

But getting less so, readers. I've surprised myself a lot since moving here - I crave solitude and silence. I hate living in a chaotic home. I can't stay up past 1 am. My idea of an awesome weekend night is a small dinner party followed by book and bed by midnight. I fantasize about time by myself and long stretches of emptiness. In short, I have become the opposite of the company-loving, late-night-party going, freewheeling girl I once was.

While these changes surprise me, I also find them hilarious. I come from a long line of 'wild children' - my siblings and I are nothing if not well-versed in living a youth full of reckless abandon (and I dare say my parents as well, as much as that might make them cringe). My lifestyle in some ways directly stems from that tendency - the risk-averse are not a prominent demographic in the international development sector. It's more the people that greet fourteen hour bus rides through desert with no air conditioning as a great excuse to drink a lot of beer. (I could easily see the majority of my family on that desert-bound bus, though Mom would have white wine). As a kid, if I complained about something or was afraid to do something, it was just sort of....unacceptable. Like how do you learn to ride a bike in my household? Dad takes you to the top of a big hill, takes your training wheels off and pushes you down! What do you do if you're afraid to ski down a really steep ski slope as a 7 year old? Get told by your mother to 'point your tips down the hill and go!' I totally want to raise my kids this way. It might have caused some heartache, but I am no wimp, and nor is anyone in my family.

So what happened to this wild child? I guess she grew up to be a pretty boring adult - who just happens to enjoy life in non-traditional places. My best friends always tell me I need to take it easier - do less, stay home more. I think they're right, like most things, and that in many ways their pleads were simply just predictions of the effects of a hard-won youth. I might not be dancing on the bar anymore, but I am tromping around the streets around Ramallah or Dakar or Casablanca or Amman. Just as long as I'm tromping off to bed by midnight.