I’m sitting here on the edge of 42.

And, you know what’s really fucking with me?

It’s that I’m about to be two people that can drink. I’m about to be two twenty-one-year-olds. That feels, and oh, some days I can feel it, like two lifetimes. I look back at that first twenty-one-year-old and barely recognize him. I see the outline of me. But it’s a faint dotted outline I can only make out if I squint. I was rash, cocky, impetuous, often cruel to others, and, I can now admit, cruel to myself. I had a chip on my shoulder, and I felt I needed to prove everyone who doubted me wrong. I craved external validation. I craved attention. I craved love but didn’t know how to ask for it. Didn’t know how to give it. And for all my teenage talk of wanting to live without regrets, I have a lot.

As I look at the second twenty-one year old I see progress. I see where I’ve learned to slow down — where I’ve tried to live with more intention and thoughtfulness and have tried to learn from my past mistakes. In a weird way, I think about how I’m best known for what I did before I turned thirty, and yet I don’t feel like I became me until the last ten years. And I hope I’m still changing. Still growing. Still putting in the work to try and be someone that I, fate willing, can look back on in another twenty-one years with admiration. If I do this journey again, I’ll be 63. I’ll be, maybe, close to retirement. Looking at time in chunks like this is freaking me out a little.

I reminisce on everything I went through to get to that first twenty-first birthday. All of school. Heartbreak. Bad decisions. A few good decisions. And this second fragment feels like a blur. More heartbreak. More bad decisions. More good decisions. Weddings. Funerals. Life.

But through it all, I do think I discovered myself. Or, maybe better put, I found who I am today, and I know how to be happy with that person. And each day, I wake up, and I accept the change, seek the growth, and … try to move forward with a little more grace than the day before.

Becoming two twenty-one-year-olds means I know now that I don’t have it all figured out. Hell, I don’t think I ever will. But I’m okay with that. I’ve made peace with the fact that life is a constant draft—an endless rewrite where I’ll never get every sentence perfect, but I can at least try to make the next one a little better than the last.

And maybe that’s the best we can do.

Maybe that’s the secret to all of it.

Not to chase some perfect version of ourselves, but to keep evolving, to keep showing up, and to keep writing the story as best we can.

While going through the process of moving away from social media and using my blog more, I realized there was a lot of me on Instagram that I wanted to make sure I archived. Specifically I’ve been really enjoying my “monthly memory” posts each month as sort of a visual “diary” of my month. And there are hundreds of posts about my vinyl collection and memories of my almost 13-year long relationship with Hannah. I didn’t want to just abandon those. So I’ve brought them over to my blog.

I used Instagram’s export feature to get the files. Then wrote a script to convert their weird export to something I could easily import, and back date, all of the posts. I had to first put everything in the same year/month/date folder structure I use for my photo blog and then convert the post to the right format so it would display here just like all the others. Even after extensive testing there was a bit of nerves running it on the live site as it ingested over 1,000 Instagram posts going back over a decade. But, it worked. And now my photo blog has all my history. I also grabbed all of my weekly wall “story” posts going back to when I started doing them from my new office. I will continue to cross post some stuff to Instagram, but, most of my writing/photos/status updates will be here, on my blog.