Grow Up and Be Kids

For my senior honors thesis, I am writing a novel, and this January that is my primary focus.  It isn’t surprising, then (or it shouldn’t be), that many of my thoughts are connected to the story.  The thought in question this morning is based on a scene of dialogue between the main character and an old friend of hers.  They are talking about a young man, whom the main character believes to be fully grown.  “There are different levels of being grown,” her friend tells her, and the main character realizes that this is true, that there were points in her life where she believed herself to be a sage adult, only to be proved wrong.

I’ve been thinking about this ever since.  It happens to all of us.  One day we wake up and decide (for whatever reason) that we are adults.  It may happen to some of us at age eleven, to others at fourteen or fifteen, but it always happens.  Even those who try to retain childlike habits and beliefs still usually wanted to be treated like equals by their peers.  From the moment of that decision, we struggle with the world to make it believe that we know what we’re doing and that we can make our own decisions.

For me, this impulse began to show its head when I was about eleven—I remember trying to look dignified in family pictures, not realizing that others only found it cute.  To a child’s mind, a “grown-up” is someone who has the answers, who knows what they want from life and how to get it.  Therefore my adolescence was spent scrambling to figure out what it was I wanted and learning to speak confidently about it, even when I changed my mind six times in a weekend.

I think, though, that there is a reason that most people older than eighteen or so don’t use the word “grown-up”.  True, it sounds a bit infantile, but also there is no such thing.  There’s no stopping point to growing up.  There is no age that is marked out at which point one is considered fully grown.  After age eighteen or twenty-one, maybe even twenty-five, life is a journey, not a destination.  And I imagine I will continue to be proved wrong on the basis of my own wisdom and self-sufficiency throughout life.  That’s the way it goes.

It’s not always a bad thing.  If you can’t be a child all your life, living between childhood and adulthood is the next best thing.  You can have the best of both worlds, living successfully and realizing how great that is.  If you never decide that you’re grown up, then living itself is always an adventure. 

Note: the title of this post is borrowed from a song by the Cab, from their album Symphony Soldier, which I highly recommend.