ArcaMax

It was the twirling end of the mustache I noticed first, before I realized he looked familiar. This was not unexpected, as I had been sitting in the Utilities boardroom for a few years, even before I was elected. When I interviewed him for a story about his time at Utilities, he was still new to his role; now he's the second-in-command at the treatment plant, and I'm sitting at the front of the room, instead of in the audience. Time has been moving forward for all of us, as it tends to. And like him, we're both firmly among the people expected to make decisions that carry weight.

Lately, those markers have been arriving in clusters, small reminders layered on top of one another until the pattern becomes impossible to ignore, including the strange collective grief many millennials felt this week as news broke about the death of someone who lived in the background of our adolescence. It was a reminder that the cultural touchstones that once felt permanent are aging and shifting alongside us, and that the passage of time is no longer theoretical but personal and unavoidably close.

Two friends have breast cancer scares that are pulling me straight back into my own experience of waiting rooms and diagnostic calls and the quiet dread that hums underneath your daily life when your body becomes a question instead of a certainty. The aftertaste of those moments lingers in ways that make it impossible to return fully to the illusion that serious things only happen later, to someone else, in some distant phase of life we have not yet reached.

At the same time, our social circles have shifted into a different rhythm, one where the divorce era that defined so many of our thirties has softened into second marriages and blended families built with more intention and fewer illusions, while our kids hover at the edge of teenage independence, granting us unexpected stretches of time to rediscover ourselves even as their growing autonomy reminds us that another season is already approaching, one where they will need us differently and perhaps less.

What surprises me most is how I feel about my friends' successes now, like watching someone receive an award for a magazine she built through years of uncertainty, and feeling not competition but a shared sense of relief that the work we have all poured into our lives is finally taking visible shape, and that the quiet sacrifices and the constant doubt may actually have been building something real all along.

In the middle of all this, I am realizing that I have grown into a version of myself that values both independence and collaboration, someone who wants to stand firmly in her own voice while also recognizing the power of being part of a team, which sounds simple until you are sitting in rooms where the decisions are complicated and morally gray, where you want safety without surveillance, progress without unintended harm, and where every choice seems to carry consequences that linger long after the meeting ends.

There are days when I leave rooms feeling heavier than when I walked in, aware that adulthood is less about certainty than about holding competing truths at the same time, even when the answers are incomplete and the outcomes uncertain.

There's a slow realization that growth is not a clean arc toward wisdom but an accumulation of years, scares, second chances, friendships, successes, losses, and decisions that reshape us without offering resolution, leaving us standing in a space that is neither the chaos of youth nor the calm of certainty but something in between, a place where we carry more responsibility, more perspective, and sometimes more doubt than we expected.

There is no tidy conclusion waiting at the end of this phase, only the quiet recognition that we are living inside the complicated middle of our lives, surrounded by people who are growing and struggling and succeeding alongside us, doing our best to move forward even when the path ahead feels unresolved and heavier than we imagined.

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Cassie McClure is a writer, millennial, and unapologetic fan of the Oxford comma. She can be contacted at cassie@mcclurepublications.com. To learn more about Cassie McClure and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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