“I don’t think you turn thirty and become immune to mistake-making or lesson learning. You grow wiser (supposedly) but never omniscient. There’s always something you need to be taught, and so you keep learning and you keep growing up- until you’re dead.”
― Jessica George, Maame
I just finished cleaning my Velvet Room―the name of my little arts and crafts room that I feel so lucky, privileged, thankful, and bashful to have. In this spiraling economy, it feels like my corner of the house is a forbidden luxury. It is one of the things that truly make me feel… “grown up.”
The way society is organized today has turned “growing up” into a luxury, all while the classic expectations of college, work, mortgage, spouse, and children are flung at the youth ages forty and younger. Yet, the path to these things is as unclear as it is unstable.
Although I feel certainly grown up with my career, home, and marriage, growing up is a privilege that I must cling to and carefully manage―one slip up (whether it is of my own undoing or unseen forces), and I am back to potentially knocking on my parents’ door and paying them rent.
As I cleanse and soothe my room with rose, vanilla, and sandalwood incense, I think about how the “coming of age” journey reminds me a lot of knitting. As we begin our road to adulthood, the stitches are uneven, lumpy, and unpredictable. Then, as we gain our footing through experience, trial, and error, our lives become more refined, and our stitches more polished…. Or, the stitches remain unpolished and hanging on for dear life.
Too many dropped stitches (fallen grades, resignations, and social mistakes), and we must unravel what we thought was progress. Then, we must start over again to build the pattern back up―hopefully better, stronger, and more reliable.
Unfortunately, life is the longest (or shortest) scarf we can ever knit. We will not see the fruits of our labor (ripened or rotten) until the very end. However, I do appreciate the journey because the day we stop learning is the day we die. With this in mind, I hope I do not earn my “Big Girl Needles” anytime soon.
The Alchemist Diaries 
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