As it turned out, it was.

"The most exciting, challenging and significant relationship of all is the one you have with yourself." --Carrie Bradshaw

And I've had quite an exciting, challenging and significant relationship with myself, if the sheer volume of stuff I've accumulated over the years is any indication. Today I arrived home in New York and decided that I needed to go through everything in my desk, cabinet and bookshelf before I could put any of my Medford stuff away. Here is a small sampling of what I discovered:

--every single letter my high school BFF ever stuck in my locker, circa 1999; they made me feel kind of bad, because we were totally and completely falling-all-over-each-other-BFF, only now without the "F" and the "B" and the..."F" parts
--a scrapbook tribute to my first cat, Koufax, including a letter I wrote to her (yes, I wrote a letter to the cat; wait, it gets worse:) after she died (it was actually really sad. it made me teary-eyed. it's also proof that I wasn't always so heartless and unsentimental when it comes to felines)
--a form letter from my elementary school principal congratulating me on winning P.S. 101's 1994 spelling bee, plus the program from the city spelling bee in 1997 when that crazy home-schooled girl won by psyching the rest of us out
--printed e-mail correspondence chronicling the break-up of me and my junior high school "boyfriend," as well as the break-up of my junior high school clique, circa 1997 (sample communication: "No one seems to be willing to put in the time and effort that it takes to make the friendship work"...my favorite part of one of the e-mails was the postscript, which was: "P.S. Do you have AOL 3.0?")

And so on...and on...and on. So I was just reflecting on it (in a "later that day, I got to thinking about my awkward adolescence" kind of way -- sorry, I've been on a major Sex and the City kick lately), because I'm sure that when I actually was nine and fourteen and sixteen years old, I wasn't thinking that in fourteen and nine and seven years I'd look back on myself and realize how small and foreign my world was. Even some elements of the S2P 2001-2002 Memory Book seem like ancient history now (although admittedly the memory of licking that powdered ramen noodle flavoring off the carpet in Cable remains, now and forever, vividly etched in my mind). Perhaps the most exciting, challenging and significant aspect of the process of growing up is that it never ends.