When the wounds begin to heal...

“Joan Baez was a personality before she was entirely a person, and, like anyone to whom that happens, she is in a sense the hapless victim of what others have seen in her, written about her, wanted her to be and not to be. The roles assigned to her are various, but variations on a single theme. She is the Madonna of the disaffected. She is the pawn of the protest movement. She is the unhappy analysand. She is the singer who would not train her voice, the rebel who drives the Jaguar too fast, the Rima who hides with the birds and the deer. Above all, she is the girl who ‘feels’ things, who has hung on to the freshness and pain of adolescence, the girl ever wounded, ever young. Now, at an age when the wounds begin to heal whether one wants them to or not, Joan Baez rarely leaves the Carmel Valley.”

-Joan Didion, in the essay “Where the Kissing Never Stops” (1966) from Slouching Toward Bethlehem

It's the “whether one wants them to or not” that struck me. Because sometimes you remember those intense and vivid moments that mark the phases of teenage identity: the way you reacted to bad times, epiphanies, poems that tear their way out of your heart, dreams, certain conversations. And you wonder where they have gone, but you are not sad that things are different now, nor entirely happy.