you know what growing up is? It's the ability to reevaluate who you are, and what you think and believe and know, and question it.

When you grow up, you believe certain things. Your parents, your teachers, your siblings and classmates and children's teevee presenters, all of them tell you about the way the world works and help form your opinions. As you get older, your feelings about everything ebb and flow. You'll feel stronger about something, and then care less about it next week or month or year. As time goes on, you'll (hopefully) never stop growing, evolving, and adjusting who you are. And we do it unknowingly. you might hate one sort of music, and come to like it over time. You might think a film is shit, but in later viewings recognize it's merits.

You might hate the taste of whisky when you're young-- scratch that, you WILL hate the taste of whisky when you're young. But as you get older, your palate changes. I took twenty years before I took an interest in politics, and about twenty three years before I developed a taste for whisky. Now, I vote and caucus and volunteer for the campaigns I believe in, and I have no problems making friends with a bottle of Dalwhinnie.

So change happens whether we want it to or not, and wether we're conscious of it or not. But growing up, reaching maturity, coming of age, any of those bullshit terms we use as a society to try and justify legal drinking or cheaper car insurance or the maturity to fuck someone, none of that comes because of a specific age. Hell, I'm not old enough to drink, because I enjoy it too much and do it too often for polite society. My car insurance never dropped because of a speeding ticket or two. And the maturity to fuck someone? Show me one person on the planet who has the maturity to do that, taking into consideration all the possible repercussions of that little bit of hedonism, and I'l buy you a drink. Or maybe try and sleep with you.

But that's not the point. The point is, tonight, I really thought about a viewpoint I had, I've had for years, and it changed. It's personal, and it's not world-changing, but it might have the potential to be subtly life-changing. We shall see. But the acknowledgement that I was wrong, and that I'm okay with having been wrong, and want to move on with my new mindset is satisfying. I had an opinion, and I'm not going to excuse it, but it was wrong. And I'm going to go forward, knowing that I can admit that and change my opinion. I'm probably going to be slightly smug about it too, but that's just my way, and baby steps to maturity.

So growing up isn't the ability to change, but it's the ability to recognize those changes in yourself, and accept them, and use them to become the person you should, are meant, to be.

Or maybe I'm saying all this cos I'm just trying to sleep with you.