I should be down at the beach right now.

I should be down at the beach right now.

I’m in Costa Rica, my first international trip since COVID, and I should be lounging in a hammock hung between two palm trees while I watch the waves rise and fall. And normally, that’s what I do while I’m here. But today, I am sitting poolside, listening to the birds and the fountain and can still hear the white noise of the ocean, even if I can’t hear the individual waves crashing. I’m sitting here because “here” feels like the right place to be this morning. I’m sitting here because “here” feels like the life that is waiting for me when the hands-on parenting years are over and we watch our kiddo grow into an adult from afar, careful not to interfere with his growth and life choices as he discovers who he is and who he wants to be. I sit here because the first thing anyone teaches you about creating the life you want, manifesting your future, is to feel what it would feel like to already have the things you want, and so as I sit here, poolside, under a tin roof with my now-cool cup of Costa Rican coffee and my laptop, here feels like my future.

A few years ago, I stumbled across a list I wrote of things I wanted to do before I was 30. There was no date on it, but if I had to wager a guess, I’d say I wrote it when I was 20. I don’t know what other 20-year-old girls want when they are 30. Marriage? Babies? That’s what my friends wanted, and that is what the magazines and movies tell us we want. But that wasn’t me. And I remembering smiling at the boldness of my 20-year-old self, when I saw that all she wanted by the time she was 30 was adventure. To be fluent in another language. To travel to 10 different countries. To live in one other that the United States. To know how to sail and work on cars and know how to read astrological charts. Nothing about that list was about convention or settling down or having a “normal” job. That doesn’t mean I didn’t want a partner to share life with or that I didn’t want to do more conventional things when I was older, just that I didn’t want to do it before I was 30.

And now here I am, at 40, and all the same things still hold true which means that I knew who I was long before I knew that I did. And I think this is really fucking cool. It feels like sort of this big middle finger to this idea that we don’t know who we are when we are young. And maybe some of us do, actually. Like maybe the people who point fingers at 20-somethings and say you don’t know anything about life are just people that ignored their true selves and found themselves stuck in a life they didn’t want because they were too scared to color outside the lines and what they are really doing is projecting.

I’m not saying that at 20 we know everything, or that we don’t use our twenties to explore what we may or may not want or make mistakes or live with reckless abandon. Because that just is plain false. We do all those things. But I think gosh, how little credit were we given and how little credit do we give as we age ourselves? Every single time someone says, “Oh you’re so young, you’ll change your mind” about any given scenario, what they are really saying is, “you don’t know yourself.”

It creates doubt. It creates confusion.

With two decades under my belt since writing that list, it turns out that *I* was right and actually, just about *everyone* else was wrong.

Maybe we actually do know who we are all along, we simply don’t give ourselves enough credit.

So what does this have to do with not being down at the beach right now? Everything.

Being on the beach feels more like a vacation, whereas sitting on a covered patio I can imagine with utter clarity that one day, this will be my life. I can imagine this patio being my own patio, and I can imagine that sitting on this outdoor couch is actually *my* outdoor couch on *my *patio and that I am being paid to sit here and write, in another country, and I can fulfill portions of that “things to do before I’m thirty list,” even if it takes a little longer than I imagined.

And there is a wild sense of comfort in knowing that this moment is just a glimpse of what is waiting for me, and I think my twenty-year-old self would be proud as I acknowledge what she knew all along.