Wilder Words + Musing: F. Scott on Early Adult Life (and) Me on Turning 25

 
Given that I'm turning a quarter-century old on Tuesday, I find this quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald's short story Cracking Up (which I found in the book above) an appropriate passage:
"Before I go on with this short history, let me make a general observation—the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise. This philosophy fitted on to my early adult life, when I saw the improbable, the implausible, the "impossible," come true. Life was something you dominated if you were any good. Life yielded easily to intelligence and effort, to what proportion could be mustered of both."
My mother says she never felt older than the day she turned 25. While I've yet to actually hit the age, I get what she means. There's this sense of impending doom; maybe because it means the excuse of "I'm a dumb kid just out of college who doesn't know what she's doing" is no longer valid. If you're over 25 you're probably rolling your eyes, thinking how young I still am, how little I still know, and I'd agree with you. But this is the first birthday where I've felt that I'm actually a real adult human. That decisions matter more, that the stakes are somewhat higher.
And yet at the same time that I'm kind of totally freaking out, I do know that so much of my life is before me and that so much is still possible. That (fingers crossed, because that alternative totally sucks) the best is still to come. I feel very much the way Fitzgerald describes; any obstacle, no matter how seemingly insurmountable, is actually completely surmountable. I can feel hopeless and sad and there's still always a glimmer of light in the back of my brain saying, "whatever is going wrong will get better." And I believe (perhaps due to the folly of youth?) that with a little bit of "intelligence and effort," my life will become what I want it to become (I say as I knock on wood).
I often, maybe always, feel two things at once. Ambivalence is constant. That's why I write, because it's a way of sorting out all the confusion, or at least making the two ideas or feelings or possibilities exist on the same page at the same time with some semblance of reason.
As I head towards March 25, I feel really old and really young at the same time. And that's okay.