Do We Ever Really Grow Up?

I've been unpacking the last of the boxes that were in storage in Florida and today I came across one that was filled with pictures taken ten years ago. The pictures actually made me laugh as I looked at the ones of myself posed in front of the Duomo in Florence, Italy, looking so earnest and trying so hard to appear fashionable because I'd recently lost fifty pounds and I thought the new skinny me in my new wardrobe would be my key to happiness. And it was in some respects, I had a great time. Yet it was still the same old me inside, with all of the same old insecurities.



And as I looked at those pictures, I wondered: do we ever grow up? Do we ever really change over the years?



I guess the reason this is on my mind is because I just turned 49, which is one of those momentous numbers. It means that for the next 364 days, I will be obsessing about turning 50 and leaving my forties behind.



When I was younger I always looked to the future and thought of the things I would accomplish and how different I would be at some future date. Like when I 'grew up'.



As I looked at those pictures of me, then considered the row of journals that now sit on my bookshelf and span the course of twenty five years of my life, and as I unpacked that beautiful white lingerie that I bought fifteen years ago to wear on the wedding night that never happened, I realized that really, despite all the milestones that come with age, we don't actually change the core of who we are. And I laughed because of this striving seems like a cruel joke and an incredible self-deception to imagine that we can ever be other than who we are.



I've realized this most when I run into old friends on Facebook and realize that no matter how I've changed, these old friends still see me as the goofy girl I was back in university.



When I lived in New York and worked on Wall Street, I imagined the pinnacle of my life would be when I turned 45 and I pictured myself riding to the office each morning in the back of a limousine, wearing a full-length mink. Today, that would be my picture of hell. Well, maybe I'd still take the full-length fur in all of its inappropriate glory, but I'd wear with with a pair of jeans and my favorite black cowboy boots, that I bought in the men's department at the thrift store.



I never became that woman I thought I wanted to be. I did something completely different. Yet I'm still so much the same girl I was twenty years ago when I first dreamed that dream. I still have the dream of creating something special, and of living life on my own terms. But what's interesting is that the years haven't changed me, I haven't evolved into something different than I was. I'm still Suzanne, with all my ridiculous insecurities, my fear that no one likes me, or that I'll always fall short no matter how hard I try, that I am neither talented nor feminine enough. And then I wonder what is the point of the journey if we can never escape who we are, no matter how much we accomplish or how far we travel from where we first began?



And then….



Just when I think I've found a great truth, I instead discover something that turns my conclusion on its head.



Recently my mother has begun to cook, something she never exhibited the patience or interest in for the first eighty-three years of her life. And then this past weekend she picked up my old battered copy of Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking and decided she was going to try a few recipes. And she, who has been willingly displaced from her home like Naomi from the Biblical book of Ruth, who chugs along on a heart that operates at fifty percent of its capacity, has created a new life for herself here and found a grace and contentment that she never had before. While I toss and turn at night, wracked with insomnia over my worries about the friends who didn't come to dinner, the snow that won't fall, the book that I will rewrite again though it's already ten years in the making, she has found peace in who she is. So while I still doubt that I will ever grow up or change who I am, I hope that I will eventually know that contentment.