You will change your mind, but you are not free.

            Your moment of freedom was yesterday.

- T.S. Eliot

50/52

I turned 27 earlier this week, which for whatever reason is my scary age. Adolescence tends to render these unrealistic expectations for adulthood, and I always thought my life would have been so much different by now than it actually is. I used to think that becoming an adult was something that just happened – go to bed a kid one day and wake up an adult the next. I don’t think I knew for certain just exactly when this day would come – 18, 21, 25 – but I believed that it would. But it happens more slowly than that. The transition transpires little by little over time, so gradually that one hardly notices.

I believed that becoming an adult meant leaving who you were as a child behind to become someone else in adulthood, and I even spent a few years trying on different personalities to see which one fit best. Eventually I realized that I had become nothing more exciting than the person that I started out as. Maybe it was in that realization that I became an adult for the first time.

The truth is, you spend the rest of your life becoming an adult, and you never really get there. The person you become as a grown-up is merely a continuation of the person that you were as a child. You will always be you, just a different version of the self you began as. And all the same insecurities and weaknesses and fears that you struggled with in childhood will still be with you, you’ll just get better at pretending that they aren’t.

Twenty-seven. It happened so fast.

Taken on: November 14, 2009

Tags:

Self-portrait

52 weeks

Me more »

50mm f/1.8

Window light

Shadows

Hat

Black

Natural light

Sunday

2009-11-15 « less

Sets appears in: • Fifty-two

Groups appears in: • Portrait (real persons only) • Of Me more » • 50mm (The original 50mm group) • SELF-PORTRAIT • 52 Weeks • Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II • [ s e l f - p o r t r a i t s ] « less

Camera: Canon EOS DIGITAL REBEL XTi, f/1.8, 1/30 sec, 50mm, ISO 400 (more info) (hide info)

Camera:	Canon EOS DIGITAL REBEL XTi
Aperture:	f/1.8
Exposure Time:	0.033 sec (1/30)
Focal Length:	50mm
ISO:	400
Exposure Bias:	+1 EV
Flash:	Off, Did not fire
Exposure Program:	Aperture-priority AE
Exposure Mode:	Auto
Metering Mode:	Multi-segment
White Balance:	Auto
Color Space:	sRGB
Software:	Adobe Photoshop Elements 6.0 Windows
Show full info

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