Growing up is really hard.
I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately. What does it mean to grow up? Why do we grow up? Why can’t we stay the same forever?
These are not easy questions and if I am being entirely honest, I’m not sure that these are questions we will ever be able to answer. What I do know is that with every passing year it becomes increasingly apparent to me that no matter how much I wish I wouldn’t, I will continue to get older. We all will. Time is a thief and whoever it is that is really in charge of this whole thing we call life is a masochist thriving on the suffering of its own creation.
There is no denying the reality that to grow up is to suffer.
If we let everyone have a choice in the matter, no one would want to be an adult. Instead, everyone would live forever in the comfortable, picture-perfect bodies of their childhood selves, forever wistful and full of naïve, simple joys. There would always be presents under the tree at Christmas, a dollar under your pillow when you lost a tooth and a loving mother and father to hold you close when something went bump in the night. But this is a dream, a clever façade.
We have to grow up.
Recently, I bought four Lalaloopsy dolls from Facebook Marketplace. When I went to pick them up, a young girl and her father emerged from behind the front door. The father looked grief-stricken, the girl looked proud. I knew immediately that, like my own father, time had stolen his little girl. She had grown up and as he handed me her toys, he was also handing me her childhood.
When I got into my car and looked at them sitting neatly in the passenger side seat, I began to cry. The juxtaposition was striking. I had once been that girl. Yet now when I searched behind my eyes, I could no longer find her. She was gone and with her, my childhood. The Lalaloopsys would never be the same as they had been when I was a little girl. I would never play with them on the carpet during library period, or out amongst the long grasses in my childhood best friend’s backyard. They were suddenly a crushing reminder that you cannot reverse getting older. You won’t ever go back.
The façade is broken; the dream is spent. We will grow up forever until one day we will forget to even remember we are growing up at all.
I don’t know what it means to grow up. If you’d hoped to acquiesce the answer to that question here, I’m sorry to share that I am no wiser than you. What I do know for certain is that I don’t know what any of it means or why any of it happens. Only that if childhood is golden fairytales, adulthood is fluorescent reality.
This is a hard truth to stomach. Growing up is hard. All I can offer is the knowledge that in some way or another, all humans must feel the same way. We live in a violent, divided society where most days it is easy to feel like everything is lost. Yet, what brings us all together is the unanimous feeling that if it was possible, we would all choose to never have grown up. To have never seen the people we loved grow up too. Even though we are separated by everything else, we can be together in that. I know it isn’t a solution, but it is a start.
And maybe, if growing up is anything, it is that.
A start.