Growing up .

---The future excites me; I can't wait to be sitting with my children, looking back on my grad photos, describing how much everyone meant to me. The ones I couldn't live without and the others I never knew. They'll laugh and point at how weird we looked back then, when at the time it was the style. They'll smile at my smile and want to grow up faster to be in that moment for themselves. They'll wonder what it was like to grow up in the past. How was it different? If they'll have to face the same decisions and problems?

Everyone wants to grow up, to get away from the tribulations that come with youth because when we're young we don't see them as advantages or opportunities. They're annoyances that only get in the way of our clean and easy path to adulthood, but I've learned to know different.
Some people long for the future in a way that's unhealthy for them. How will they ever learn anything if they just skip ahead? How will they come to understand who they are before they're thrust into the harsh world? Others though, long for the future to be able to look back on the past. They live their lives as best they can, so when they grow old, they can share their stories with others. Reflect on them and understand why things happened that way. This is what I believe in.
If you're having a hard time, you can look forward to growing up and not having to deal with it. But you also have to understand that while you live through it, even if you don't understand it then, you're going to come out okay on the other side. You'll survive. You can look back and analyze what you think it means afterwards, in the future. This gives you room to breathe, instead of being a captive in your own mind. You have time to do things that you love instead of always focusing on problems.
It's harder to remember the bad things that have happened to you, mostly because we don't want to remember them, but that doesn't make them unimportant. Store them somewhere, learn from them. Live it up while you can, when you're older all you can do is look back on your past.