Turning adult…remaining a child
The thin line between childhood and adulthood is adulthood. Realizing you are a child and those conscious decisions towards letting some things go.
Does anyone ever tell you? What it’s like becoming an adult. Probably because it is not a thing🤷♂️. First was the sweet sixteen raves. Everyone wanted to turn 16. I thought ‘Perhaps, I’d feel different that day’. A lot wiser? Grown? I wasn’t sure which but I thought certainly there had to be this…feeling. The day came. I felt the very same. Maybe becoming an adult after turning 16 was a foreign thing🤔( Some excuse that was huh😆).
Regardless of what turning 16 felt like, I have no memory of when it started; The change within me. It’s probably a closed loop. But I do remember turning 18 and thinking ‘This time it certainly would be different’. What with being an ‘under-g’. Things certainly felt different then. I was away from home and making my meals. Deciding whether or not I was going to attend lectures. That felt to me like epic fulfilment. Some days, it still feels as though there was a time jump between when I still clung tenaciously to everything I thought I was to this very moment. All those days I looked to someone else for approval my voice an echo of theirs. The fears and insecurities I had which manifested in ways I thought I could call strength. Hiding beneath the wings of my parents and siblings to fight battles I felt I wasn’t old enough to handle. I just did not take responsibility.
Then came the lost phase. When all my ‘knowledge’ failed me when friendship began to feel a lot like a full-time job that I could not keep up with. I couldn’t define then, what exactly had been my drive before then. To prove them wrong? Who was ‘them’ again? I spent all that time before then proving myself to people when I had yet to become an entity.🤦♀️ How do you prove yourself when you are yet to define you? So I started to define myself. I began doing what I enjoy doing and turns out I was a lot of things I thought myself parallel to. I stopped having two, but one opinion to a lot of stuff. I consciously went online and sought out music that I enjoyed listening to. This change did not appear from the blues. It took getting to know some people, who had defined themselves down to the littlest period.
I realized somewhere between meeting different people and creating dreams of what I wanted; what exactly being an adult meant in my life. It meant those conscious decisions towards letting some things go. Towards acknowledging my fears as my fears while working to let them go; or, make them into strengths in the ways I could. It did not mean having my life all mapped out like I thought it would, but leaving the confines and restrictions I had blamed my society and environment for placing around my collar.
I don’t know all things. I don’t have everything all figured out. I still waver. Despite all these, one thing has changed that needed to; getting to the knowledge that I did not know everything. Better put ‘Acknowledging my shortfalls and naivety in a lot’. Being able to learn; unlearn; and relearn. So you see, in many ways, one could say that “Children are adults; and Adults, are children” until a certain clarity comes to us. Not one defined by were we grew, but how we want to move from where we are towards the better future we want to have.
Looking back at that time of my life, I realize how much of a child I was at those moments that were supposed to define whether or not I still was a child. And how much of children a lot of ‘adults’ I have come across are. So fixated on their ideas and thoughts they are unable to see another. Like shutting your eyes and arguing it’s wide open simply because you’re peeking from behind whatever is between your eyes and the view.
Turning adult became to me, the thin line between childhood and adulthood. The ability to evolve from a stage in life to the next. Not just physically, but in every sphere of my life.
