Ever notice that when you meet someone, for the rest of the time you know them you are always somehow stuck at the age you met them at? I don’t mean they treat you that way, I mean you treat you that way. This gets me all the time, and I hate it.

I have a group of friends that I met when I was something like 18 or 19 and they were all in their late 20’s or older (that’s a lie, I wasn’t the youngest but I was one of and there weren’t many and shut up my point stands) and I always felt like the kid. In your early 20’s a few years is a huge gulf. So I always felt like the kid in this group, no matter what. It wasn’t something they did to me or a way they treated me, no the feeling just came about because of my own insecurities and age. But now, years later, I see some of those people and I have to fight back the feeling that I’m this kid again.

We imprint.

Many of my closest friends are people I have spent enough time with that there is no age blocking, we’ve grown up together. I don’t just mean the few people from High School I still talk to but also a few folks I met right around the turn of the century.

And all of this is a preamble to why I am slightly twisty about going to SF later this month.

See I’m going to be staying with family. Now it is family I love dearly but let me explain. I will be staying with my sister and my nephew. I didn’t meet this sister until I was about 13. So when I met her (She’s ten years older than me? I think?) I was full of being 13 and awkward and unsure and meeting this person that I thought was really, actually, quite cool and I was just a kid.

I went to her wedding and hung out with her friends and they were awesome people but I was just a kid. So they tried to make me feel welcome but I was, say it with me, just a kid. And every time I see her I fall back to that. The defensiveness, the awkwardness, all of the shuffling and uncertainty just envelops me for a while.

I hate it.

My nephew is … young. I want to say 10 but he may be 11 and I feel like a jerk because I should know this. But either way he is what he is. And I hang out with him and I am caught between treating him like the person he is and trying to make sure I don’t leave him feeling like I did, that somehow he is the kid, and I think I make a hash out of it by even trying. Big shock, right?

Because when I see them I end up torn at first blush. I feel like a kid but I don’t wanna make him feel like .. and I kinda shut down. You know when I met him I think I came into the house, dropped my bags heavily on the floor, took off my sunglasses and said “guh.”

Now, granted I had flown out to L.A. the morning before, leaving my house at 4am, gotten to L.A. had meetings and then gone to bed at 2am L.A. time before getting up to catch a 6am flight to SF so I was a wee bit tired. But even still.

It isn’t that I came off like a bastard. I am a bastard. I just got hit by a wave of all that crap at once and didn’t know what to do. My amazingly fluid and deft way out of it all?

Guh.

And as I hung out more I got past it and all was right with the world. My nephew thinks I’m cool (this is how you can tell that he is either: A) young B) very sheltered C) heavily medicated or D) delusional) and I’m sure that will wear off. My sister thinks I am cool as well and she should certainly know better. For her sake I’ll limit it to D.

Still, I’ll be there for something like a week this time and I worry about this sort of thing. I want to be able to just be me around them. And sometimes I am, but not every damn minute. Sometimes I get caught in the trap. That’s just human, I know, but it annoys the crap out of me.