Ashleigh Baker

A few years ago I caught the second half of a movie trailer in which Anne Hathaway is bemoaning her days spent working in a Mexican restaurant instead of pursuing her dreams. The story’s haphazard hero looks at her from behind a table and says, “Everyone’s lost at 25.”

I picked up the movie when it landed in Redbox if only for that one line, which proved to be much less important to the story than I’d hoped. Slightly bemused at 23, I wanted to know just how messed up I was supposed to be by the time I reached my quarter-century mark.

One of the peculiarities of marrying at 18 and cradling a newborn by the time one reaches 20 is that when a person decides it’s time to grow up, she has, in essence, already done so. Backwards. Wedding vows, babies, a bit of real life and then, oh, I suppose it’s time to grow up a bit, isn’t it?

When John and I were engaged and I was approaching both my high school graduation and my wedding day, people who asked about my post-graduation plans would furrow their brows and cluck their tongues, warning against getting married “before I knew who I was.” My eyes would roll into my skull while I sweetly recited a sentence or two about growing up together, being confident in my own being, not seeing the need to wait until I reached an arbitrary milestone and suddenly knew who I was before I married this guy.

Naivety is both endearing and infuriating.

At 17 and still even at 23, I believed I was above the process, I could avoid the messy years by simply not living them, jumping ahead, becoming the older version of myself sooner rather than later.

But 25 crept up on a muddy, bruised version of me. Hair flying, face streaked with tears and sweat, grieving the security I had taken for granted, I remembered the line from that Anne Hathaway movie.

Apparently everyone is a little bit lost at 25.

We’re messy creatures, we humans. The growth process doesn’t disappear if we ignore it and, apparently, it doesn’t respond to our rabid kicking and pushing. Seasons and eras refuse to be skipped, despite our desire to stand with our arms folded across our chests, nodding in the assurance that we have arrived.

We want the big picture, don’t we? The job security, the artsy apartment in New York, the mission in Africa, the two car seats strapped into a gold minivan, the adoption placement. We want the book deal, the notoriety, the music contract, the acceptance. The spiritual peace, the physical healing, the restored relationship, the end of grief.

We want it to fall into place, we want to see our shadowy visions realized, we want to know our actions today are at least making a difference.

 

So we tell ourselves we can grow up too quickly, we can skip ahead to the good part, we can move forward before our hearts are ready. We pound the bars of our cages, begging to be released and allowed to move already. We’re prepared for it, of course we are.

And we don’t even know we’ve disrespected the journey.

 

I didn’t know, at 17 and 23, the depth of love one person can have for another when both are spectacularly unlovable. I hadn’t felt the explosion of passion when fighting for the one thing you didn’t realize you believed in. I didn’t know how to tap into the strength one gathers in the quiet. I hadn’t discovered the rich, beautiful mind residing inside my own head, nor the deep reserves of emotion and character welled up inside my breast. I hadn’t come face to face with the enormity of my faults nor acknowledged the darkness raging in my belly.

If I had tried to gather my own tribe of journeymen, I wouldn’t have thought to choose these ones. Until it happened, I couldn’t possibly learn how to regain my balance after tripping over my own feet, nor how to breathe again after knocking the wind from my lungs. And I would never, ever have guessed that I’d come to treasure the tender spots left by each deep gash and purple bruise.

I’ve fought my way to here, to right now, to being 27, still so young and very alive. I’m sure I’ll clamor at the feet of 30 and 35 and 40 and 50, just the same, though perhaps with a little less naivety and entitlement and hopefully much less whining, because there’s enough of that going around without me adding to the chorus.

But I won’t presume to jump ahead before I’ve earned my place with battle scars and stretch marks, wild dancing and glorious laughter.

 

The world’s best wines and cheeses are the aged ones, of course, the ones that have rested, matured, “ripened.”

The trees that weather the elements for decades are the ones with the most shade, the strongest trunks and the deepest roots.

Honor the journey. Revere the process.

You don’t get to skip it.

We’ll all get there eventually.

 

I was seven, at my friend’s house down the street, and we were running along one of the dirt hills typical of the California desert child’s playscape. For an afternoon, we were beautiful grown-up women with houses and cars and busy lives full of walking in and out of our houses and driving our cars to very important places. She declared her boyfriend’s name to be Kevin, as usual, and waited for me to bestow a moniker on my imaginary significant other.

But instead of telling her my handsome out-of-thin-air boyfriend would be Dillon or Brandon (it was 1993, after all) I stood taller on the dirt slope and told my seven year old friend that I didn’t have a boyfriend.

“Well, are you playing you broke up with him?” she asked, drawing lines in the dry sand with a stick to indicate walls and doors. It annoyed me to hear other kids use the word “playing” when they meant “pretending,” because games were played and make-believe wasn’t a game. But I wasn’t quite pretentious enough to correct them aloud.

But no, it wasn’t that I had pretend-broken-up with my pretend boyfriend. Taking a deep breath, I announced to the little girl from down the street that I didn’t want to have a boyfriend at all anymore, that my parents had heard about this thing called courting, that it was kinda like dating but without girlfriends and boyfriends and nobody could kiss each other until they got married.

“Huh. Well. That’s weird.” She squinted, as we all did under the intensity of the hot desert sunshine. “So what’s the name of the guy you’re doing that courting thing with then?”

 

By twelve years old, courtship speeches were old hat, having perfected the rattling off my modesty rules, my why-homeschoolers-don’t-need-socialization argument, my list of biblical reasons women shouldn’t hold jobs, ever. At 15, I discussed fabric headcoverings vs. a woman’s hair as her covering complete with Greek roots, and if you wanted to delve deeper into veilings vs. caps or hair up vs. hair down, I’d go there… with a gentle and quiet spirit, naturally. I was well-versed in the unnecessary evils of college for all high school gradates but especially girls, and my journal pages were filling up with personal wrestling over predestination and free will. By 17, those broad topics had become dry and tired, and I’d moved on to determining which musical rhythms displeased God, the finer points of the Bible version debate and whether teenage girls could wear front-slit denim skirts without defrauding a brother.

I knew my stuff, once upon a time, and wasn’t afraid of speaking up.

 

 

Life is a constant pendulum swing, and I spent a few years teaching myself to ask questions more than I found answers and to doubt more than I believed.

I viewed the Ashleigh of 10 and 20 years ago with disdain, curling my lip at her as she played across my memory in handwriting and typed print, stating untried opinions boldly, scattering her juvenile certainty like dandelion seeds, using parroted phrases and an upturned nose as a debate tool.

Becoming convinced of how much one doesn’t know can make a person hesitant to speak at all, lest she be dead wrong again. And somewhere in the necessary sorting and sifting I’ve lost the ability to know my mind, to hold opinions and offer them aloud. If I speak at all, it’s in circles, round and round, rambling about nothing and everything at once. Petrified of a misspeak or of my future self’s disapproval, I bite my tongue until it bleeds.

Silence is healthy and very often it’s even holy. But sometimes it becomes nothing more than a shield behind which fear can cower and tremble.

 

Recently I’ve been leaving the question marks off of my sentences. I’ve begun to explain without five justifications per one certainty.

Not because I’ve discovered I know everything, but because I’m comfortable admitting I don’t. I’ve acknowledged and welcomed my loose grip on answers and truth and I’m gingerly testing its safety. Will it hold me?

I’ve even started being gentle with the know-it-all Ashleigh of 10 and 20 years ago and imagining I can trust future-me to do the same. I’m cautiously optimistic, believing perhaps a realization of my own limitations will enable me to hear instead of prescribing and projecting. I’m trusting myself to own new words of peace and understanding instead of arguing and questioning, simple grace instead of harsh judgements.

Being okay with being wrong takes practice, especially when one has spent her life clinging tightly to her answers.

But I’m learning to own my words.