Five

Saying goodbye at 26

I'm coming up on my fifth year here in Finland. I started this blog in February of 2011, in anticipation of my move. I was about to turn 26. I'm 31 now.

I'm regularly astounded by how much weight is placed on that particular decade shift. Although I'd like to think I've matured, there's little difference between me as a person in her 20s and me as a person in her 30s. I still have the same interests and desires as well as comparable flaws and insecurities (aside from the added neurosis derived from hearing and reading that I'm suddenly old). I still love shoegaze, video games and NPR, I still laugh (a lot) at poop jokes, and I still don't want children.

There, of course, have been a handful of life-changing events that have served to demarcate the before and after. Among them are my move to Finland and, I believe, this relapse. 

I'm still fighting my way through it - if I focus on relaxing my leg, my limp is only slightly noticeable, and I'm able to produce scrawl enough to mark exams - so I'm not really sure yet how and in what way these changes will take shape. Except, I know this: I will never again walk, climb stairs or write without a sense of thankfulness. 

The fact I'm no longer in my 20s might be obvious in that this happened at all; it's only now, in my 30s, that my motor skills have suffered. And that's what I'm most afraid of - that this is the ushering in of a new, less-mobile normal. That it's all downhill from here.

In the meantime, that thought is hereby banished from my mind.