Proving my title

Inspired by shoes, just a warning to those of you that are less frivolous.
I have a lot of shoes. Really. But i only have one pair that i call my "sensible shoes." They're simple black, share toed, black leather heels of about an inch and half. They go with business clothes. They don't draw attention to themselves, which is why i only own one pair of shoes like this. I'm a young, poor graduate student. I don't have money to waste on shoes to begin with, but if i'm going to waste money on shoes, they sure as hell aren't going to be something that no one would ever notice. They have their place, however. For example, i'm attending the professional society meeting for my field next week, and while i have to play dress up all week, sensible shoes are definitely in order. I assume that i'll at minimum have to have a PhD before i can show my personality through my shoes... but the delicate balance of dressing like a woman in a male dominated field is a subject for another blog post on another day. What i'm really here to talk about it what i realised when i noticed how beat up my sensible shoes were. The leather was really peeled on the toe of one of them and the heel of the other was wearing through the black polished part of the leather. Of course my first instinct was that i had to find a way to fix them because i certainly don't have the money to spend on new sensible shoes right now. A quick brainstorming session lead me to a bottle of black nail polish. Sitting on the floor of my bathroom i started to think that one day i would be past the point in my life where i needed to fix my shoes with nail polish. I wondered if i would think back on this memory and laugh to myself about the time in my life where that was my best[only] option. I suppose i started to associate this with a point in my life where i would be more "grown up". But what does that really mean anyway. And who's to say that just because i reach a point in my life where i have the means to have other shoe care options, that things couldn't happen in life and i could be right back here one day, on this now metaphorical bathroom floor.
I'm starting to realise that "growing up" is more complicated than the steps that i've been lead to believe. It seemed to follow a simple order... graduate high school, graduate college, get a job/go to grad school then get a job, maybe get married, maybe have kids, freak out at mile stone birthday(40, 50, 55, whatever) and realise that you're over the hill, retire. That seems really naive now. For starters, i grew up three times in college: having my heart broken, paying my own bills, and then the end of my 5th year(which was all too complicated of a time to explain in this post). But furthermore, it seems like a rather linear way to view things. It's now starting to seem that "growing up" is a multi-dimensional process. I'd been led to believe that one is immature or naive about something and a life experience makes them more "grown up." But it seems that that isn't how things work at all. Deciding that Ryan was the man i wanted to marry was as much of a growing up experience as actually marrying him will be. I'm not even sure that he realises how much i made a sudden and drastic change in how i imagined my life after beginning to date him. It wasn't that i never wanted to get married. i just thought that life had a different set of cards for me. I didn't discount that i would meet someone around the time i finished my PhD and started to be in a place where my life could be more predictable, but i had pretty much entirely written off finding someone who wanted to spend the rest of their life with me before then. It was a big gulp to swallow: not that i had to become a "we" but that i *wanted* to. My vision of my future changed dramatically, and so, i suppose in a way i "grew up" with that realisation. But i don't think that i was immature, naive, or even selfish before for not wanting to be a "we." It's not that i didn't understand why being a "we" was a good thing. I just saw things for myself differently. The process of growing up isn't a line, or even a plane. It's a true infinite space. It's probably not cartesian either, or we'd have too easy a time finding the shortest path vectors to where we need to be.
By the way, the shoes actually came out pretty well. one would only notice the nailpolish at very close inspection, and as i previously mentioned, that's not what these shoes are for. :)