I picked up this book because I wanted to read something by this author, not because I wanted to read this specific book. When I read the back I didn't resonate with it at all, which makes sense—it's very much giving me midlife crisis vibes. It's a really interesting concept, but it's not geared toward teenagers, and that's okay. So perhaps I'll reread it when I'm forty. But when I finished reading the introduction, there were two things that really hit me, and I started realizing that parts of this book might be for me.

First of all, there were a lot of things in the introduction that I was really connecting with. On the surface, this is for people in the middle age, but I'm really connecting with this growth pattern—and that's really interesting. And I came across this paragraph where he says that he's not talking about the literal halves of your life in terms of age (no one knows when they're going to die), but the spiritual halves of your life. And I was really connecting to this concept, but y'know, maybe I'm just young and naive and think that I've grown all that I can grow or whatever—I'm sure that when I'm older, this will be more relevant.

But then he brought up that it's not age-dependent, it's growth-dependent. And he mentions that trauma and life experience can force people into the next stage of their life when they're not yet ready, and that kids who feel like they have to grow up too fast kinda hurry through the first half of spiritual growth because they have to, because they have to be independent, and they don't have that space that a young person should have to create themselves. They have to hurry to fill themselves with things; they don't have the space for creation. In his ideal growth pattern, you spend the first half of your spiritual growth creating yourself and the second half filling yourself. And then he drops out of nowhere that trauma can make you have a rushed creation of yourself, because you have to fill it with things, because you're forced to grow up too fast. And more and more with capitalism, technology, etc., people have to do this. I don't think this book is for me, but this paragraph is.

One thing that a lot of queer people relate to that I've talked to is that we have to do our own spiritual growth. Obviously everyone has to do that for themselves, but especially for queer people who grow up in religion: we create our own theology, usually without help of parents or spiritual leaders, because those people are either un-affirming or they just don't understand. If you're not queer, you can't really embody that queer theology the way queer people do, and basically if you're a kid or a teenager, and you're trying to accept your sexuality and spirituality, you have to do that work yourself. And in an offhand paragraph, in this introduction, Rohr really encapsulates something that so many of us have had to go through, which is that we didn't have that space to create ourselves and look to our spiritual elders for guidance, and then have the rest of our life to fill ourselves. We had to hurry and create something that we could fill with affirmation because otherwise we couldn't survive it.

The other thing that hit me after I finished the first few chapters is that, besides the introduction, I honestly didn't really relate to this. It's geared toward people in their thirties and forties, not me. But then I thought, Wait a minute. I'm going to live that long. God willing, I will be a forty-year-old someday. And I just had to sit there realizing that I have spent more than half of my life up till now assuming that I won't make it to twenty. And if I had read this book even five years ago, I would be reading it as someone in the second half of their life. I would be reading it as if it were directed toward me, because it would be. But now that I've stopped expecting to die any minute, and I'm no longer living with constant suicidal ideation, I'm recognizing that this book is not written for me because I have so much more time to live and grow before I'm in the spiritual place that he's writing for. And so even as I'm not connecting to what he's saying, I'm sitting here realizing that someday I can reread this book and realize that I have had decades to create myself that I never thought I would have. This book isn't for me, but it will be someday. And that means so much to me.

So completely coincidentally, I, a nineteen-year-old, got a hell of a lot out of this book. I've had to grow up too fast and do a lot of makeshift spiritual growth, and I have so much time to reach the stage he's writing for, because I'm going to live.

The three-star rating is because while it helped me realize some things, and I got a lot out of parts of it/some of his ideas, as a whole it's still not a book I'd recommend to most people, even after all of this. Other reviewers have explained its flaws better. I'll get back to you in twenty years.