I renewed my driver’s license earlier this month, an adventure all on its own. I live a half-hour between two different license bureaus in my area and I usually need to plan errands of this caliber with some amount of intentionality no matter what’s at stake. I typically expect routine obligations like this to play out the way I picture them in my head. When things start to diverge, I won't always handle it well.
My first attempt to complete this task started off by cruising down the highway headfirst into a torrential downpour, converging perpendicularly with a train that couldn’t decide if it wanted to go forward or backward for several minutes. I eventually reached the license bureau parking lot, sat patiently in hopes that the rain would subside, came to the realization that it wouldn’t before the office ceases operating hours, stepped courageously out into stormy weather while attempting to shield my important documents as if they were a newborn child, sprinted from point A to point B as expeditiously as my feet would allow to minimize any appearance of soaked hair for my photo op, only to discover upon entering the door that there was a statewide outage affecting every license bureau and I’d have to come back another time. An afternoon not so well spent.
A couple of days later, I tried again. I decided to venture in the opposite direction toward the bureau located in a larger town, one that had a line spilling out the door by the time I arrived. Once I got inside, I took a number and waited. I occupied space in an awkward limbo zone that wasn’t quite in the waiting area but also wasn’t exactly part of the main walkway to the entrance. There I stood, blocking a couple of vending machines, uncomfortably close to a bunch of strangers, for much longer than I would have preferred, until a chair opened up. The lady I’d sit next to grumbled about how two proofs of address may be required to renew a license, a possibility that had me starting to panic after everything that happened up to this point. She decided it was a waste of time and left, but I was determined to be finished with this experience, so I stayed put. After staring ahead into the bureaucratic abyss and growing hypnotized by the sound of overworked government employees calling out numbers, the red segmented display on the wall finally counted up to the digits printed on my slip. I sat down at the only available station, passed along all of my documents to the worker on the other side of the plexiglass screen, crossed my fingers, went through the usual motions and then walked out of the building, temporary paper license in hand.
Weeks have gone by and I’ve since received my updated driver’s license in the mail. Comparing this latest ID photo with the one from six years ago is strange, I don’t even look like the same person. Peering closer at my old license, my face looks puffy and rounded, I’m wearing cheap tattered clothing my dad probably handed down to me, my full beard is unflattering and patchy, my receding hairline is plainly visible, and perhaps worst of all, I have a dopey, vacant grin on my face. August 2020 was a rough time for me. I was adrift, living a life of uncertainty, brimming with anxiety, underemployed, sedentary, left without much of an identity to speak of beyond whatever online media I consumed that week. Even if COVID-19 hadn’t taken the world by storm that year, I wonder if things would have looked any different for me.
By contrast, my latest picture makes me look six years younger. I’m visibly tanned, my facial hair is scaled back to a simple mustache and chin puff, the hair on top of my head looks much thicker, my face appears more angular and my expression is more neutral and refined. The improvement in my physical appearance reflects back positive lifestyle changes I’ve made in this timeframe. Looking at myself in the mirror each day does little to indicate progress, but on a long enough timeline, the difference is stark.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the future lately. I’ve spent too much time dwelling on past mistakes that led to me becoming the person I was in August of 2020. Shifting to a goal-oriented mindset has led me to a quantifiably better place—even if this hasn’t become the idealized, unattainable version of life we all pine for. The life I desire won't ever look like the life I'll eventually have. I’m not a perfect person, and I never will be. I can fixate on miniscule details about the way I look or how I dress, but I doubt anyone else cares all that much. Though I may appear younger today than I did six years ago, whatever remains of my youth is not going to last. There are still big what-ifs that I need to confront on one of these undetermined dates ahead. I only get one shot at this life. It’s hard not to get frustrated with how much freedom I have yet such little wherewithal to make the most of it. I would like to find a way to stop feeling like I wake up every day on square one and start making more moves forward. I guess the important takeaway from all of this is to acknowledge once and for all that I haven’t been on square one in a very, VERY long time.