Some things I chose. Some things I grew into without choosing.
The patience, for instance. I was not patient at thirty. I was efficient, which is not the same thing, which is actually almost the opposite of the same thing. Efficient moves through waiting rather than being in it. Patient stays. Patient understands that some things take the time they take and the wanting them to take less time does not reduce the time, only reduces the quality of the time, makes the waiting harder rather than shorter. I grew into patience gradually, through years of waiting that did not resolve on my schedule and did not shorten in response to my urgency, until eventually the urgency ran out and what was left was patience, or something close enough to patience that I have started calling it that.
The tolerance for ambiguity.
I needed things to be resolved at thirty. I needed to know where I stood and what was coming and how the story was going to end, which is a reasonable need and also a need the world is spectacularly uninterested in meeting. The contract years cured me of the need for resolution. Twenty-five years of pending, of planning to, of always-almost, of the future always slightly conditional, will have done that to you. I emerged from the contract years able to live in the not-yet in a way I could not have done before, which is one of the strange gifts of having had no choice about living in it for so long.
The comfort with my own company.
I was never afraid of being alone but I am something more than not-afraid now. I am genuinely good company for myself. I have things I want to think about. I have interests that exist independent of their usefulness to anyone else. I find myself worth spending a morning with, which is not something I could have said with confidence at forty and can say plainly now without irony or qualification.
I grew into these things through the years, through the difficulty and the loss and the accumulation of a life that did not go as planned and went, in many ways, better than planned because unplanned lives make you adaptable in ways that planned ones do not.
I would not give back the years that grew these things. Even the hard ones. Especially the hard ones.
They made me someone I am glad to be.
