Essays

by Scribe Leaf Library · 4 min read · 0 views

I found an old journal recently, the kind with a cheap plastic cover, written when I was seventeen and certain of exactly the kind of adult I intended to become. Reading it now is a strange and specific discomfort — not because seventeen-year-old me was wrong about everything, but because he was right about several things I've since, quietly, without ever quite deciding to, let slide. He wanted to be someone who kept promises, even small ones, even inconvenient ones. He wanted to be someone who noticed when other people were struggling and said something about it rather than politely looking past it. He wanted, very specifically, in a passage that made me put the journal down for a full minute before I could keep reading, to never become someone who used the phrase "that's just how things are" as an excuse to stop trying to make them better. I have used that phrase. More than once. I noticed it happening in real time, actually, a few months before I found the journal, in a conversation about a friend's unfair treatment at work, and I remember feeling the words leave my mouth with a kind of automatic ease that should have alarmed me more than it did at the time. We talk a lot about becoming who we want to be, but very little about the opposite risk — quietly becoming someone our earlier self, if he could somehow meet us, would be disappointed by. Not because we made some dramatic moral failure, nothing so clean and nameable as that, but because of a thousand small accommodations, each one reasonable in isolation, that add up over years into a person who has simply stopped noticing the gap between his stated values and his actual behavior. I think this happens for an unglamorous reason: maintaining your younger self's standards is exhausting in a way that erodes slowly rather than all at once, and erosion, unlike collapse, rarely announces itself. You don't wake up one morning having decided to stop keeping small promises. You simply let one slide because you were tired, and then another because the first one apparently didn't matter as much as you'd thought, and eventually the sliding becomes the norm rather than the exception, and you've become, without any single dramatic decision, a person your seventeen-year-old self would have specific, uncomfortable notes about. The useful question, I've decided, isn't whether you've changed — everyone changes, and plenty of that change is genuine growth, wisdom your younger self simply didn't have access to yet. The useful question is more specific: which changes are growth, and which are erosion wearing growth's clothing? Growth usually comes with a story you can tell honestly about why the change happened and what you learned. Erosion usually comes with excuses — "that's just how things are," "everyone does it," "I don't have the energy for that anymore" — phrases that explain the change without actually justifying it. I've started using my seventeen-year-old self as an informal audit, which sounds more precious than it actually is in practice. When I notice myself reaching for one of those explaining-without-justifying phrases, I try to ask, honestly, whether the version of me who wrote that journal would accept the explanation, or whether he'd recognize it immediately as the exhausted rationalization it actually is. He's not always right — he was seventeen, after all, and didn't yet understand half of what actually constrains adult decisions. But he's right often enough, about often enough of the specific things, that the exercise has become genuinely useful rather than just nostalgic. The promise-keeping, specifically, I've gotten better about since finding that journal. Not perfect — I still occasionally let a small commitment slide when I'm overwhelmed, and I suspect I always will, being human and finite in ways a journal written by an idealistic teenager never had to account for. But I notice it now, where I used to not notice it at all, and noticing, it turns out, is most of what was actually missing. I don't know what my seventeen-year-old self would think of the man I've become overall. Better than he feared, probably, in some ways. Worse than he hoped, probably, in others. But I've decided that's not really the point. The point isn't to perfectly satisfy some idealized younger version of yourself who never had to actually live the life you've since lived. The point is to keep him in the room during the decisions that matter — not as a judge exactly, but as a witness, someone who remembers what you once believed clearly enough to notice when you've quietly stopped believing it, and who might, if you let him, help you catch the sliding before it becomes the whole slope.