Reactionary

When I was a little kid, I tended toward the histrionic side of things.  My family still gets a kick out of the time I picketed the family room, trying to get Dad to stop smoking.  "But, Dad, I don't want you to diiiiiiieeeeeee!" God.

And I was a junior hypochondriac, too.  I must've worn my Mom OUT with my requests for bandaids, for cold packs, for ATTENTION MOM GIVE ME SOME ATTENTION.  Jeeez. 

And then I grew up and left home and in my late teens, all of my drama tended to revolve around my romantic life.  Then I got a little older and poorer and got more involved in the day-to-day struggle of finding enough money to pay for annoying sh*t like food and gas.  *sigh*.

THEN, as I hit my thirties, I got a little more comfortable, money-wise, and a little more resigned, romance-wise, and all of a sudden I had time for CAUSES.  Save the whales!  Feed the children!  MAKE LIFE FAIR!  Oh, yeah, that whole, "life should be fair" thing is a big one at a certain age, ain't it?  And of course, I knew EVERYthing and my self-righteousness knew no bounds.  Oh, I went through an insufferable spell, no doubt about it.

Then the forties rolled around and ran right into fifty, and now?  If you poke at me, instead of being met with an "AAAAHHHHHHH!" and a screaming lecture, you're gonna get a side-eye and a sigh.  Oh, I still CARE about things, just a little more ... selectively.  And somewhere along the line, I actually learned to, well, LEARN about things before going off into a steaming hissy about something.  And most amazingly of all?  I learned that I don't have all the answers.  I don't even know if there ARE answers to some of the big things, to tell ya the truth.

Who knows?  They say that as you get older, you regress, so maybe thirty years from now I'll be in the nursing home begging for band-aids and ranting about how President Bieber ruined everything.

Is this common?  Does everybody go through sea changes in their thinking as they age?  I kind of hate to think that I'm the only one.