Last Thursday I was watching a live Happy Hour with some of the cast members of the Bob and Sheri show. I was listening to Sheri, Lamar, and Heather talk about middle school and high school and how, at that age, everything can feel like THE THING.
The breakup.
An argument with your best friend.
Not getting invited.
Getting embarrassed in front of everyone.
The teacher who doesn’t like you.
The rumor someone started.
The horrible haircut.
The test you failed.
The person you desperately wanted to notice you who didn’t.
At that age, something can happen on Tuesday and by Wednesday morning you are absolutely certain your life is over.
Listening to the conversation, I started remembering.
Not just specific events, but the feelings attached to them.
Things that seemed enormous.
Things I thought I would never get over.
Things I was convinced everyone would remember forever.
Things I probably cried about, obsessed over, replayed in my mind, or thought would somehow determine the trajectory of the rest of my life.
And now?
Some of them are barely memories.
That’s when something occurred to me.
Of course, everything felt so important.
I didn’t have anything else to compare it to.
When you’re thirteen years old, you have thirteen years of life experience and you probably don’t remember much of the first few.
You don’t know yet that friendships can end and new ones can begin.
You don’t know that the person you can’t imagine living without may someday become someone whose last name you struggle to remember.
You don’t know that embarrassment has an expiration date.
You don’t know that there will be other schools, other jobs, other relationships, other cities, other disappointments, other victories, and entirely different versions of you.
You haven’t lived long enough to have perspective.
Perspective is something life gives us later.
At fifty, I can look backward and place those moments into a much larger story.
That terrible day was one day.
That awful semester was one semester.
That person was one person.
That rejection redirected me.
That embarrassment eventually became a funny story.
That heartbreak healed.
But the younger version of me couldn’t possibly have known any of that.
She hadn’t lived the next chapter yet.
I think adults sometimes forget this when we’re talking to younger people.
We say things like, “It’s not the end of the world.”
“You’ll get over it.”
“Someday you won’t even remember this.”
“There are more important things in life.”
And we’re probably right.
But we’re right because we’ve already lived the years that taught us that.
They haven’t.
If the worst thing that has ever happened to you happened yesterday, then it really is the worst thing that has ever happened to you.
That’s your point of reference.
And maybe that doesn’t stop when we graduate from high school.
Maybe we continue doing it throughout our lives.
Something happens at thirty and it consumes us.
Something happens at forty and suddenly everything else disappears.
Something happens at fifty and we wonder how we’re possibly going to navigate it.
Even with decades of experience behind us, the thing happening right now has a way of becoming the biggest thing in the room.
Until eventually it isn’t.
Something else happens.
Life expands around it.
We gain distance.
We gain information.
We gain perspective.
And sometimes we look backward at something that once felt enormous and wonder how it ever occupied so much space inside us.
Not because it wasn’t important.
It was.
It just wasn’t the whole story.
We couldn’t know that while we were standing in the middle of it.
Maybe that’s one of the unexpected gifts of getting older. We begin to understand that there is almost always a chapter we haven’t read yet.
I wish I could go back and tell my younger self that.
Not, “This doesn’t matter.”
Not, “You’re being dramatic.”
Not even, “You’ll get over it.”
I’d tell her:
I know this feels like everything right now.
But you haven’t met the rest of your life yet.
Reflection questions:
- What memory once felt like the end of the world but looks completely different from where you stand today?
- What would today’s you say to the person you were while you were living it?
Theresa
Flexible Being
Empowering Your Journey to Healing, Clarity, and Self-Discovery.
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Theresa Martinez-Shapiro
Theresa Martinez-Shapiro is the founder of Flexible Being, a Reiki Master, Certified Oracle Guide, intuitive mentor, and writer based in Stockton, California. Through Musings of a Flexible Being, she explores healing, mindfulness, relationships, intuition, and personal growth with a grounded yet spiritual approach.
