Where do we go nobody knows

What is this feeling I have tonight? I was flipping through old photographs from Guatemala... from the very first trip three years ago with Joshua. I looked so different. The innocence strikes me the most. In the revelation of a youth now departing, the magnitude to which my life and my self have undergone changes is what apprehends me the most. It is disconcerting in a painful way. Perhaps it is only painful because most of the time these days, I silently remark to myself on how I'm actually growing up. It's in the sudden contrast now, that the void becomes most obvious.

What makes me believe that I'm "growing up?" Is it a new-found sense of confidence, of comfort in one's own skin? Is it the badge of loss? Or is it something deeper... something inherently more painful... true loss of innocence. I relate it most to the point at which a child looses their belief in the make-believe world, when the child can no longer imagine universes to which they don't immediately know are not really real, but created by themselves. In these photographs of the twenty year old Jamie, she still believes in the magic of love. She still believes that love-making is soul-mergingly sacred and not just sometimes sex or "fucking," that her life is bound by fate, that perhaps there are spirits guiding her along, that her tarot cards really might hint of something true for the future, that the lover who just showed up on her doorstep was divinely guided there, to that spot, in that exact moment.

My life has changed. With it, my sense of wonder seems to have been likewise altered -- shifted, grounded by the harsh realities of, well, reality I suppose. But there is a profound sadness, a heart-breaking realization that goes along with this notion of "growing up" -- one that I'm really rather uncomfortable with.

The women in my family have been amazing mentors. Every step along the way I have looked to them as guiding lights, as role models for the way I should consider the world. Becoming an adult has been one great initiation right into this special club of women in my family. It has always been something I strived for, to be one of the "big girls," but now that I'm officially a big, grown up girl, I actually miss what I was before... the innocence of my childhood, that strain which carried over into my earliest twenties but which I fear has been lost to the necessity of being a "grown up."

There's tension here, and internal conflict. I've always personally prized my ability and continual quest for not only growth, but change... knowing how necessary and spiritually healthy it is. But with the changes, comes uncertainly, loss, and pain. Change, that thing I once held on such a magnificent pedistle, now seems more daunting to me than exciting, or even healthy. I don't want so much change anymore. And maybe this is just another piece of "growing up"... we slow down, settle. I suppose, if this is the natural course of things, I hope with all my heart that I do not lose or forget the things that are most important to me: a sense of personal freedom, belief in magic, faith in the spirit, and enchantment with the pure things in life like soft skin, basic loves, and sweet dreams.

I think if we put too much focus on society, all the beauty alive in the world of youth will escape our sights. Keep the eyes wide open, and the heart even wider.

(Photograph taken at age 21)