Sharing cells with your 16-year-old self

My friend from high school and I have a tradition: We call on each other’s birthdays. His is in the fall. Mine is in the spring. No matter what, we talk at least twice a year.

This year, on my birthday, I asked, How long have we kept this up? What, almost 20 years?

Yeah, he said. [no big deal.]

Then, Yes! You were at my 16th birthday party! 

And somehow “16” was much more jarring than “almost 20 years ago”. We were 16. Sixteen. 16. Who’s sixteen these days? (No one in my life.)

Sixteen was a universe ago. An age. More than half a lifetime. We didn’t know what the point of high school was. (I’m still not sure about this.) We didn’t know what we’d be doing after. We didn’t know what we’d be studying or where or when. We hadn’t yet traveled much. We hadn’t yet hung out thousands of miles away, in New Orleans… and even that was 11 years ago. Whew. We hadn’t yet had Chinese food or gone to the restaurant where A got food poisoning. We hadn’t gotten married or even met the people we would marry. We had yet to have any of these twice-annual birthday phone calls.

I don’t find birthdays traumatic. I don’t feel old. I want to be (and am) trying new things. Making new friends. Exploring career options. Getting better at a variety of things. I haven’t settled on what I want my life to look like. I don’t feel constrained in ways I don’t want to be. 

But still: 16. How can we share cells with the 16-year-old versions of ourselves? How are we the same human beings? Who were we at 16?

I thought about it. And realized:

16-year-old Ophira? She would have been totally cool with much of my current life.

She’d have been cool with learning to be a good partner. With exploring career interests and being independent and figuring out how to stay independent rather than fitting into a poorly-sized box. With getting stronger, trying new types of exercise. With playing at improv. With dancing. With writing. With talking to everyone, all the time.

Which is comforting. We take all these turns in life, we make all these decisions, but we are always the ones making those decisions. Any time I look around and choose what looks like the right thing to me, any time I look into something I care about, I am being true to myself. “Myself” is just what I am. Underneath the titles and the age and the current style of hair and glasses and the bite splint I wear at night and the crappy clothes—okay, those could really be better. Underneath all the surface things that are signs of “Ophira in 2019” is just Ophira. Ophira who likes to read and explore and talk to people and learn new things and be active. Ophira who gets that she doesn’t always frame things in productive ways and wants to learn to do better. Ophira who loves to dance. Ophira who laughs at most everything in a way other people still notice.

(Seriously, I thought I’d passed this stage of life, but just the other week, three people in my improv class commented on my laugh because I still can’t keep a straight face.)

And people still feel comfortable around me, even though I’m pretty sure I bring the awkwardness to the yard sometimes. 

How was I was already fully myself so long ago?

I have nothing outside my physical self in common with the person I was then. My relatives may be the same (plus new additions since then), but none of us live in the same place as before and few in the same place as each other. I interact regularly with zero of the same people outside my family. I’ve moved multiple times. I’ve studied different things. And yet, I am the same person. 

I guess this is what people mean when they say to look back on what you did and loved as a child to figure out what you might want to explore, what skills or qualities you want to focus on, because there are certain fundamentals that aren’t likely to change even as everything else does.

I’ve noticed this in other people, too: A still likes taking things apart to see how they work; he still needs to break things down to their most basic level to truly understand them (which is what makes him a great teacher).

There’s that beautiful quote from Steve Jobs’ commencement speech:

You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.

I’m in my mid-30s, and some of the dots are finally beginning to converge. Just knowing that they can, that all of this random jumble of life experiences, of interactions and lessons and reactions and choices, can produce something useful and interesting (if only to me), makes it exciting to find out what comes next.

Happy year of birthdays, of discovering what comes next, to you.

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