Age aint nothin' but a number...or is it?

I've been thinking a lot lately about an anecdote I have grown a little too fond of telling.
In order to explain the craziness of the last 18 months of my life I tell people the story of my premature mid life crisis at 26 years of age.
I was born 2 months premature so I have resigned myself to the fact that I am likely to pass through most life stages earlier than most but even if 26 is too early for a mid life crisis it was a crisis none the less.
At age 26 I was suddenly quite ill and was off work for a few weeks and trapped in my bedroom for far longer than is normal. I looked round the photos on my wall and the stuff I had accumulated and had a sudden desire to change everything.
At first I thought it was a kneejerk reaction to being ill, but it wasn't.
Then I thought it was because I had moved a lot as a child and I was scared of being settled, but it wasn't.
Before I could figure it out I had the urge to start making a list.
I made a list of things I wanted but didn't have, things I had but didn't want and all the things I thought I would have done before I hit 30 years of age.
It was quite extensive so when I recovered I got to work on it straight away.
A year later I had gone travelling to Thailand, done a 6 week playwriting course and moved house. Another year later and I had set up my own business, raised £3,000 to do a trek along the Great Wall of China for charity, got on a Creative Writing MA course and changed jobs twice.
Looking back now I think it was silly of me to do everything in such a short (and very intense) period of time but ultimately my self imposed deadline helped to kickstart my life, not my life as it was but my life as I'd always dreamed it would be.
And here's the thing, if you ask yourself if you are happy with where you are now you might say one thing but if you ask yourself if your ten year old self would be happy with where you are now you might say something completely different.
I think at 26 years old I found myself spending some time with my younger self and I didn't like the way I looked through her eyes.
Not that there was anything terrible about my life, there just wasn't anything inspiring about it either. There wasn't anything that made me jump out of bed in the morning or that kept me up late at night.
Nowadays I have more lists of things that do both these things than I have hours in the day.
It's pretty exhausting but it can be exhilirating too.
Sure, there's lots I still haven't done yet (my latest joke is it's easier to get an MA than it is to get a date in this city) but there's also something I've never felt before which is...a sort of connection.
I don't know how to describe what it is I feel I'm connected to, nature, karma, fate etc but when I look around my room now I don't feel like I need to change everything and when I don't know what the hell is going on deep down I know it's ok because the struggle means I'm getting somewhere - that I'm taking a step on a path that's heading in the direction I need to go.
At 26 I had a mid life crisis, by 27 I had disconnected from my life as I knew it then and now, at 28, I feel connected to a completely different way of life.
I don't know what my ten year old self would say about me now (though I think she'd wonder why I don't own horses by now) but I'm pretty sure if I were to spend some time with her again it wouldn't result in any sort of crisis this time.
My life now isn't the one she dreamed about living but it is more likely that it might become it.
I'm still 2 years off my deadline and I hope in that time life continues to evade, challenge and completely surprise me.
If nothing else it'll give me a better anecdote to tell.