When I was sixteen years old and taking AP Lit, Mr. Powell had us read a story called “Eleven” by Sandra Cisneros. I still think about it often. In fact, I’ve thought of it at so many stretching, tender junctures of my life that I suspect it’s framed much of my perspective on growing up and aging (which, though we don’t always articulate them the same way, are in practice essentially identical.)

In the story, the narrator is turning eleven, but she is having a hard birthday—hard in all the small ways that feel searing when you’re a preteen. An abandoned sweater is found in the coatroom of her elementary school, and a classmate tells the teacher it belongs to our birthday girl, who is then, to her bone-deep mortification, made to put on a sweater which is not hers, which is old, stretched out, and smells bad. She cannot find the words to explain that it is not hers, and she bursts into tears in front of the whole class on her eleventh birthday. Because, she explains, she’s eleven that day, but she’s not only eleven.

What they don’t understand about birthdays and what they never tell you is that when you’re eleven, you’re also ten, and nine, and eight, and seven, and six, and five, and four, and three, and two, and one. And when you wake up on your eleventh birthday you expect to feel eleven, but you don’t…You feel like you’re still ten. And you are—underneath the year that makes you eleven. Like some days you might say something stupid, and that’s the part of you that’s still ten. Or maybe some days you might need to sit on your mama’s lap because you’re scared, and that’s the part of you that’s five. And maybe one day when you’re all grown up maybe you will need to cry like if you’re three, and that’s okay.

It was half my life ago when I first read that passage, so now I’ve spent years and years being conscious of those layered ages as each new one stretches over me like another skin: seventeen and nineteen and twenty-two and twenty-six and twenty-eight and thirty and so on and so forth. And I know this is ridiculous, but in the last year or two, I’ve begun to feel that those previous years have gotten to be too far away, separated from the surface of myself by too many coats of film, that I’ve got to mine down into myself to reach them, and mining takes effort and a pick-ax. 

I want to reach them, though. My fourteen-year-old self was foolish and dramatic and selfish, but boy, did she know about joy. And myself at twenty-two, though terrified of nearly everything, knew the value of growth. She knew how much she needed it and, more than that, she knew how to make it happen. I am firmly adult now and I too easily to tell myself the lie that the main goal of life is good administrative functioning—writing the to-do lists, making it to as many meetings as possible, being eminently reliable, having answers to all the questions that anyone might ask at any given time—when, if I remembered to be eleven and eighteen and twenty-seven as well as thirty-two, I would recall that the actual main goals of life are simpler and larger: to walk faithful and humble, to allow Love to make me new, to laugh without fear of the future.

So here’s to letting the oil of gladness soften the layers the years have made, to becoming like a little child, and to trying to make time for everything, but always leaving an hour slot open for nothing, an hour when I can walk my neighborhood in the sunshine or the rain, softly telling myself strange stories of what could be.