I put in an offer to co-purchase a house.  Tomorrow the sellers either accept, counter, or reject the offer.  It’s a nice house that meets my needs perfectly, in an area of the island I want to live for the foreseeable future. Hopefully it all goes well, but if not, there are many more houses that fit my needs (the benefit of having few needs).

I’ve thought a lot about being 25 recently.  Like when I was seriously deciding to look into buying property, when I was filling out a mortgage application, when I was signing the offer contract, when I was contemplating being in debt for thirty years, when I was thinking about how much my life has changed in just the last five years and how much potential for change there is in the next five, when I was reflecting on how little job security I have as an un-contracted freelancer that is dependent on a single person providing me with enough work to sustain my lifestyle (that is not guaranteed), when I spent three hours in Starbucks on Saturday night reading through a hundred pages of documents that I had already signed and agreed to, and when I was sitting on the beach over the last few weeks looking at all the people a lot older then I.

I’ve thought a lot about being 25 recently.  Like how I haven’t had even a hint of a relationship in two years, or how I live in a place where I am isolated from everyone but my parents and grandfather, about how I will very soon have no friends within a 5-hour plane ride, about why that doesn’t bother me, about how all my posts start off light and end heavy and how that could be seen as a metaphor for my life so far.

I’ve thought a lot about how it doesn’t matter how old you are.  A boy dies at 4, a woman lives till 120.  A 13 year-old girl builds a multimillion dollar empire, an 80 year-old man loses everything he owns in a tornado. If you have support, and the ability to make things happen for yourself, I think little else matters.  If you don’t have the support, maybe it’s time to start building it by giving to and trusting others.  If you can’t make things happen for yourself, maybe it’s time to stop depending on your support so much and learn to hold your own. If you are afraid to lose what you have, maybe you should think about giving it up.  Maybe it’s just easy for me to say because I have both already.

I’m 25 and I’m co-buying a house in Hawaii.  A year ago I didn’t know what that meant.  I might still not actually know what that means.  It doesn’t matter, because I’ll figure it out, it’s what I do.  In no time, I have climbed to the top of my list, and I wans’t even racing. I figured out a way to get a job I love, I figured out a way to live in paradise, and I figured out a way to own a piece of paradise.  One day I’ll figure out what to figure out next.  Until then I’m free falling.