I find myself back at the age of 18 quite often. Not in photographs, but in the quiet moments when a memory ambushes me—driving past a street corner, hearing a song, or watching someone else make the same choice I did. No one told me I was in training for life, but I was. Every hour was a rehearsal I didn’t know I was performing.
At 18, the world feels like a dare. Consequences are abstract, like a foreign language you assume you’ll learn later. So I spoke fluently in reckless decisions. I burned bridges because I thought I could swim. I borrowed against fortunes I hadn’t earned yet. I mistook adrenaline for wisdom and confidence for clarity. Each choice carved a line into a story I’d have to outlive.
For years I carried a cheap shield: “I was young.” I held it up like it explained everything, like it could refund the damage. But youth is an explanation, not an absolution. Saying “I was young” doesn’t unbreak what was broken. It doesn’t unlearn the lessons other people paid for. At some point, the calendar stops being an alibi.
What I didn’t understand at 18 was that life was interrogating me daily. Every risk, every shortcut, every silence was an answer. What do you value? I answered with impulse. Who do you want to be? I answered with avoidance. What will you do when it’s hard? I answered by leaving. I didn’t hear the questions. I only lived the replies.
And then one day, you wake up inside the answer. The job, the relationship, the trust, the debt—financial or emotional—that shows up like a shadow you can’t outrun. My life had become the response to a prompt I never read: What happens if you live like nothing counts?
Outliving that story isn’t about erasing it. You don’t get to tear out pages. You get to write new ones while the old ones still show through. Outliving it meant learning that responsibility isn’t a punishment for youth—it’s the evidence you survived it.
I find myself looking back at 18 because that version of me still needs teaching. But I don’t visit to excuse him. I visit to remind him—and me now—that training never ends. The difference is, today I know I’m in it. Today I hear the questions before I give the answers.
We’re all in training. The reckless years aren’t a free pass; they’re the entrance exam. What you do after you fail it—that’s the real test. And that’s the story I’m still writing, one deliberate line at a time. I am the answer I became.
“You who are young, be happy while you are young, and let your heart give you joy in the days of your youth. Follow the ways of your heart and whatever your eyes see, but know that for all these things God will bring you into judgment. So then, banish anxiety from your heart and cast off the troubles of your body, for youth and vigor are meaningless.” – Ecclesiastes 11:9-10
Being About The Journey 