Growing is recognizing that you can’t run away from who you are.
As a child, I imagined adulthood to feel cinematically stoic and demure. You grow up to become steadfast like an aircraft carrier, standing upright between heaven and earth with the world on your back. The things that terrified you as children shattered upon our feet. It’s how I coped with a turbulent home, imagining myself as some kind of paternal figure, and I grew up to be anything but.
It took me ten years to realize that you don’t actually graduate from childhood, and magically emerge on the day you’re 19 or 25 from the cocoon of youthful trepidation in a final, evolved form. You don’t become wiser and smarter either. School is like learning with training wheels on. You probably finish school with the delusion that you know things, which makes you dumber than the kid who knows that he knows nothing.
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It’s anxiety about anxiety, panic because of panic, shame of shame. I am restless, agitated, always scratching at the urgency you feel three minutes before the deadline. Around me folks are hitting milestone after milestone. They have become good, steadfast people and have found their stride and gathered their tribe. Yet here I am, after a series of zigzags and detours, back to where I started, still besieged by childhood nightmares. I can’t help but question if for the past ten years I had lived at all, and wonder when the fuck will I grow up.
I don’t think I’m alone in this. Some of us happen to need more time untangling the existential thread. Meanwhile we’re just dumb kids playing dress-up, faking it in the hopes of making it.
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So here’s an alternative proposal to adulthood. Let’s not pretend anymore. Let’s stop blaming parents, childhood, God, luck, or the errant sperm for what’s wrong with our lives. Life is what it is, it’s not anyone’s fault, least of all our own. Let’s stop envying too, of things we didn’t do, of stuff we don’t have, of lives we haven’t lived, of our mate Tony born with a big brain and a big dick. Let’s stop pinning our hopes on a magical place where everything becomes OK.
Let’s instead take what we already have, enjoy scenes along the paths we stumbled upon, and the appreciate the things that give us the smallest pleasures, and love the people who already tolerate our bullshit – beginning with ourselves.
#00117F 