It's a funny thing... Growing up
Because you never know what you want. And sometimes you wonder if you ever really will.
You want to be independent. You want to be strong. You want to stand on the tips of your toes, stretching towards everything that life has to offer you, to taste a coffee that you bought for yourself at a café, while poring over texts full of loves, lives and living. But at the same time, you want to be at home, listening to your mother’s woes and worries as she runs around the kitchen, making you laugh. You want your dad to hug you and you want to hear, feel and smell everything in that little touch, years of love and dependence in that one embrace.
You want to make a name for yourself, a career to perform, you want to love working and working hard. You want to love loving your own work and admiring it at the end of the day. But all in the same moment, you want to be out and free with friends, chilling at park or the beach, laughing and fighting. Just the same as always.
You want to grow, but you want to keep the past with you, as part of yourself forever. You want to experience love. The truth of it, the things that all the books talk about, the songs and the poems, the emotions that course through lovers when they’re with each other. But at the same time, you want to hold onto little crushes and feelings, you like the simplicity of it all, and you know that someday it will all be different.
You want to be by yourself for once, you want to know that everything at home is your own, not shared with anyone else, not made and brought forth by others. But you also want to be taken care of, loved in ways that aloneness will never provide. You want protection, but you desire to escape the shell of it.
Most of the time, in the growing up years we never know what we really want. It comes with being in this middle stage of neither-here-nor there. It’s special in it’s own right. It has it’s beautiful moments; a first kiss, the first salary earned by oneself, a passion, a fire, burning ambition unique to this stage alone, quiet moments at windows, listening to the pitter-patter of rain and feeling all the freshness that follows. As I was told when I entered my teens, “It can be the best or worst time of your life.”
We all doubt. We all wonder where, how, and most importantly, WHO we will turn out to be. But though it’s difficult to understand sometimes, it’s important that we know that we’re not alone. Not by a long shot. And though we sometimes fear we will lose ourselves that should never be a concern, for you’ll only ever know the value of something once you lose it. And don’t worry. Because eventually you will wade back to where you are meant to be, or if not, swim off into rivers fresher and more beautiful than those you left.
It can’t be promised that we will grow up to be just the way we want to be, just the way we imagined ourselves. But it can be promised that everything about your future, every bit of it is in your hands. So step out there. Mould it. Make it. Believe. Love. Dance. Dream. Do. And don’t look back. Because it’s just not worth it.
