Well, Time Has a Way of Throwin’ It All in Your Face

I grew up in a town with no 24-hour businesses. Technically there was a gas station or two, and, for a while, the Price Chopper supermarket at the top of the hill. But there were only so many grocery store sheet cakes and bags of cheese munchies one could buy at 3am before the thrill was gone for good. So after parties or late shows, we had a tradition: we would pile into somebody’s car, hit the highway, and drive almost an hour south into Massachusetts to get to the Whately Diner.

The Whately Diner is everything you’d ever want a diner to be: it’s in the middle of nowhere, the only visible business around, close to nothing but the highway. It’s an active truck stop, with showers in the back and rows of diesel engines idling all night in the parking lot. The diner is decked out in chrome and neon, inside and out. There are little old jukeboxes at every booth with a shocking variety of songs; for a dollar, we could put on multiple plays of Free Bird right as we walked out the door, guaranteeing that everyone left in the diner would be subjected to at least 20 minutes of the same guitar solo again and again. The coffee was always hot and mediocre, the menu large, and the staff remarkably tolerant. It was the perfect destination for a bunch of 19 year-olds looking for an adventure and a greasy meal long past everyone’s bedtime. I spent so many nighttime hours there - sometimes with rambunctious groups of friends, sometimes having long and enigmatic conversations with the wrong boys (they were always the wrong boys), sometimes just sitting quietly with a co-conspirator or two, trying to fend off sleep just a little longer.

One of the strangest realizations of the past few months is that suddenly, as an adult, I live remarkably close to the Whately Diner. I drive by it on the highway fairly often, this strange relic of my past, excessively imbued with meaning. So last night, we finally went. How strange it is, and how wonderful, to sit in those same seats with different eyes - to have long conversations with the right person, to feel grown up and steady in a place where I only ever felt chaos.

Moving back to the part of the world I grew up in has meant experiencing moments like this over and over. I’ll end up in a place that I used to spend time, and I’ll be overwhelmed by how incredibly different life is now. These places force me, for a moment, to revisit who I used to be.

So many of us romanticize the time in our lives when adulthood was in reach for the very first time. We felt cool, we felt powerful, we had fun all the time. We could vote and buy cigarettes and drive 45 minutes to eat pancakes in the middle of the night. We were caught up in the constant thrill of it, romanticizing our own lives more every day.

In these diner-booth moments, when I’m suddenly gazing backwards into my own history, all the rose-colored filters come off. Sitting in the present in the setting of the past, I see things I couldn’t admit before: I was miserable then, tortured and insecure. I was a terrible friend, caring so much more about image than substance. I made lots of questionable choices, and none of them involved choosing myself. I lived solely for other people and I never let myself face the ways it exhausted me. I gave years to the wrong people. I never felt safe. I always thought I’d be happier if I was running for something else.

At some point (probably when I was 18), I made a promise to myself to always live in a way that would make my 18 year-old self proud. It was only a few years ago that I finally realized that maybe, that was an absolutely abysmal idea. Maybe my 18 year-old self had absolutely no right to dictate the rest of my life; trying to make her proud may have kept me exciting, but it also kept me unhappy.

Last night, I sat in the Whately Diner and felt a sense of overwhelming relief. We don’t have to be trapped by who we used to be. We can say to our past selves “thanks, but no thanks,” and move on. We can get older, we can gain perspective, we can calm the hell down. It might be one of the best parts of being alive.

So today, I hope you take stock of what you’re holding on to. Maybe there’s something you need to let go of. Maybe something you think is holding you close is actually holding you back. I hope you find it and set it free. And if you do, or you already have, maybe you deserve some pancakes.