To put it plain and simple, growing up is the worst best thing in the world. Or the best worst thing in the world, I’m not sure which. We get to vote, we get to drink, we get to fall in love, get married, and start a family. Through all of this we get to pay bills, drink too much, work ourselves to the bone, fret over feeding our family, and watch the ones we love suffer. It’s all very grotesque, really. The thing we all want to do, yet never want to experience.
I feel like in the past two years I’ve grown up far more than I ever dreamed I could. In ways, I wish I hadn’t. I’m happy with my personal growth; I’m happy, healthy, and enjoying my life. I have a boyfriend I love and who loves me. My job, while not extravagant or high profile, is rewarding and fills me with pride.
But watching the ones I love grow up aroung me makes growing up so not worth it. I’ll never be able to be a person who can watch their friends drink themselves into oblivion, flunk out of school, or fight for their lives without feeling their pain in my own soul. Growing up and dealing with the effects of such terrible adult situations makes everything so awful, makes everything seem so worthless; why have a potentially happy anything when it all falls apart?
In the end, I’ve been ok with growing up not for the good or the bad, but because it’s inevitable. We can hold back, shelter ourselves, and ignore with every fiber of our being the lessons growing up teaches us, but in the end, it still happens. The only thing we can do is accept it, learn from it, and move on. No matter how much we hate it, or how much we wish it didn’t hurt.
I guess I have no real point to this blog post tonight. I can’t fully express all that I want to, seeing as the totality of it is so heavy; so real. The totality of what growing up really means, and what it means we have to deal with. Especially when you though you’d dealt with it all before.
All you can do, then, is when the bad parts of gorwing up do come, you have to remember what it is you have that is good. Hold on to your good, onto your happy, onto your solace; it makes the bad so much easier to handle.
Much Love,
K.E.
