do we know ourselves better when we're children?

The other day I met up with my best friend from first grade for dinner. Our friendship dwindled during high school and we grew apart. We didn't have a falling out or anything, we just ended up hanging out with different crowds. I am not sure what drew us to become friends initially. Perhaps I just wanted to have a friend who looked like me (she's 3/4 Chinese, 1/4 Native American). I am not sure if we had anything else in common. We always had fun when we hung out though.

As we caught up over dinner, we came to find out that our post-college lives have been quite similar. She served a year with AmeriCorps and she even considered a masters in library science at University of Maryland. Like me, she also considered being a school counselor. She has finally settled on starting her career in the field of social work - a field that I could have seen myself getting suckered into.

It's funny how our paths diverged so much during high school and then so shockingly close in our adult lives. In terms of post-college lives, I'd say none of my friends' lives are as similar to mine (with the exception for my Boston friends). So, perhaps in my early, early years, I was able to pick out like-minded individuals or maybe our childhood inclinations foretell a lot more about our adult personalities and interests than we think.