You know you're an adult when...

...when you experience that feeling of defeat. The year I'd say I genuinely became an adult was 2011. This is from a December diary entry:

I'm thinking about the slow changes, the kind that move mountains. 

It's easy enough to love strangers: they are so far away I can't even see their teeth. Hitler is a favorite of mine. And the serial killer who cut off his victims' limbs while they were still alive. I spent one night overcoming my inherited propensity for terror, holding him in my heart and loving him, using him to realize my water nature, my starfish nature. He was my teacher and my medicine.

But it's the chronic aches and pains, which water and starfish and medicine don't cure or wash away, but only allow us to live with–that is what I am thinking about, seated in my parents' living room surrounded by home on all sides. It's those little turns of the screw, administered by friends and lovers and family, that teach me the meaning of the phrase day after day after day.

When I returned last year from halfway around the world I thought it an opportunity for change, and I wanted each one of you to come along with me, be by my side. I hid nothing from anyone. Today, in my parents' living room, in the epicenter of my return, I am looking down at my lap and I am silent because I have nothing left to share, except perhaps the knowledge that what was lost is not coming back, and that what is close has infinitely more power to lay you low than the greatest of imagined terrors.

I am lowering my gaze, reseting the scales, and attempting to realize my tectonic nature. I have given up holding any of you in my heart; you are too unmanageable. I seek only to hold myself, and even that is now beginning to shift.