Ageing.

It's no secret that the older you get, the more you learn, the more experiences you add to your repetoire and the wiser you become. But they don't tell you about the pain, the suffering, the hardships you gotta get through to become that way.

Don't get me wrong, I know how lucky I am to be alive and to have lived 21 years of life. Some people get flushed out with the morning after pill, a day after conception. Some don't even make it out of the womb alive. Then there are those who will never see the first day of school, or graduate college, those who will never fall in love or experience parenthood or grandparenthood.

But entering the twenties, I always had an idea of what life would be like. Happiness, freedom, money... But I never thought about things that I've lost, things I left behind, memories, regrets. And it truth, my life is only just beginning. Up until this point, I have been lucky not to have suffered great loss or endured great pain. When you're younger, you can't wait to be an adult; to live on your own, the freedom of going and coming, the freedom to eat chocolate cookies for dinner and nothing else. But as you get older, as you become an adult, you learn that with age comes pain, loss, regret. You start to miss who you were, what you had and where you used to be. And of course, you can always move forward, but there will always be a wandering eye that looks back and brings on the sadness, and the obvious truth of what you have lost. There's those sayings about not allowing yourself to look back, because you can't change it. While that may be true, for me, its also because looking back brings on a crippling pain that makes it impossible to move forward.

Give me innocence, inexperience and ignorance, any day.