Rambles

I cannot recall the specific day I started feeling "grown up."  I experimented with grown-up things throughout my adolescence, as well as held onto much of my childhood as I became an adult.  At some point I realized that I had the world at my fingertips every day.  No one was telling me what to do or where to go.  To this day, I am overwhelmed by my own independence.  Nostalgic for guidance or structure, but too proud to simply follow a crowd.  I think that's the hardest part.. figuring out the crowd in which you feel at home.

You carry the weight of your decisions on your shoulders, alone, though, once your older.  While we feel comfortable swimming with the school or running with the pack, at the end of the day, only you are accountable for your actions.  Only you can feel the slap of the wrist when you've done wrong.  Only you can change.  Only you can stop existing.

Growing up has only magnified my sense of loneliness in this life.  Not a loneliness that can be cured by a group of friends or family.  The type of looming awareness of the singularity of my own life and undeniable mortality.  The fear of all that I will never know, along with confused terror of eternity.

Since I was a child, I have felt the same sinking stomach, butterflies in my chest, leaping heart emotion when I think about it.  It makes me feel small.  Minuscule.  Like I'm shrinking with every syllable.

Maybe when I lose that feeling, I will feel more like an adult.  Maybe it's the directions to Neverland scribbled into my shoulder that keeps me clenching to the romping, grass-stained and dirty palmed part of me.  Despite my whole quarter of a century (almost) of living, my body and mind won't soak up the notion that I'm somehow grown.  Perhaps when I feel like I have more wisdom I can classify myself with the word I so feared as a child..adult.. but not yet.

I'm suspended somewhere between a sheepish, yet undeniably curious, little girl and an independent woman.  A girl who doesn't mind a little dirt beneath her fingernails with a thirst for spontaneity feels constrained into this conformation to the belief that you just have to grow up.  Plagued.  Not by swarms of insects or fatal disease, but with dollar signs and documents.  She can feel that little girl fizzle away with every peeling away of the sticky white triangles of envelopes housing debts to work towards settling; with every depressing news story;  with every new war.

Checking the mail and watching the daily news makes a girl want to hide under the covers and wait for the knight in shining armor we read about in fairy tales.

And yet, an open field flooded by sunshine and scattered with dandelions will have that little girl bursting from my toes.  A forest brings out the scavenger hunter and a beach, the architect.  When you think like a kid, sparks fly from simplicity.  You can be whatever you like, wherever you like, if only you imagine it to be.  Why do we lose this as adults?

So as for the day that I finally grow up, I hope it never comes.  To be a grown up in my mind is to accept the world as a place I cannot change.  To succumb to whatever I am told is the right way to live my life.  To live the lesson society wants us to learn.

I'll keep my wonder and amusement, thanks.  I will take my dreams and hide them from your judgement until they have blossomed into something you cannot critique.  You can have your stress and exhaustion.

This song played on my Pandora station at just the right time.  I have been working on this entry for a while, deleting, editing, re-editing.  I've heard this song a million times, but it really spoke to my sense of obligation in growing up.

"Everything must run it's course.."  -MGMT

If you liked this, you might also like Perpetuality, Nostalgia or Restricting Freedoms.