This “Growing Up” Business Is Frustrating And Annoying And I’d Rather Be Playing Video Games Honestly But It Just Keeps Happening
I’m 38 years old.
But somewhere inside me, I’m still 28 years old… and 18 years old… and depending on how good the Marvel or Star Wars movie trailer that was just released is, eight years old.
“I am still every age that I have been. Because I was once a child, I am always a child. Because I was once a searching adolescent, given to moods and ecstasies, these are still part of me, and always will be… This does not mean that I ought to be trapped or enclosed in any of these ages…the delayed adolescent, the childish adult, but that they are in me to be drawn on; to forget is a form of suicide… Far too many people misunderstand what *putting away childish things* means, and think that forgetting what it is like to think and feel and touch and smell and taste and see and hear like a three-year-old or a thirteen-year-old or a twenty-three-year-old means being grownup. When I’m with these people I, like the kids, feel that if this is what it means to be a grown-up, then I don’t ever want to be one. Instead of which, if I can retain a child’s awareness and joy, and *be* fifty-one, then I will really learn what it means to be grownup.”
I believe this wholly. And that makes growing up ANNOYING AS HELL.
Today, Mike Dawson posted an amazing breakdown of where food comes from, explaining the difference between farming vs. factory farming and the responsibility of humans to think of themselves as animals on this Earth. The 38-year-old me read this and thought: this is by far the most impactful statement on where food comes from and our place in that cycle that I’ve ever read (and also, probably one of the best uses of the Medium platform for publishing sequential art I’ve seen). I even contemplated my own relationship to meat in my diet and if I should eliminate it.
The eighteen-year-old me chimed in. He bitched and whined and was all like “DUDE, come on, you’re not seriously considering not eating meat, are you? That’s ridiculous.”
This is what makes growing up very hard. The various me’s I’ve always been are still in me. If we’re breaking it down by age, then all 38 of them have a seat at this gigantic round table in my brain and, when an issue arises with how I want to think versus how I’ve always thought, they all chime in.
Sometimes, the scene is every bit as chaotic as the fist fights that break out in the Ukrainian parliament.
Some of the stuff that’s started legendary round-table rows in my brain:
- Not buying my happiness, because “new things” simply become “things” once the “new” is gone and happiness is something you are, not something that happens to you
- Learning that love is something you do, not something you have, and everything is temporary and you can’t hold on to something that wants to leave — all you can do is love it while it’s here
- Trying to actually understand the problems in Baltimore
- Understanding why some people don’t want facts and figures and to do research, they want to be told what to care about and why they should care and don’t want to do any research for themselves… and they are not to be judged, they are to be pitied
- Not judging people based on politics and religion, because they can’t help that they haven’t yet realized that what you believe is not who you are
- In fact, becoming who you are is a process that requires completely stripping away what you believe, what you own, who you know and what you do
- A month (or five) of sleeping on someone’s couch because you have nothing and no one wants to know you when you have nothing will leave you questioning what you believe, which ultimately reveals who you really are
- Understanding that some of my perspectives on gender relations has been programmed in me from a young age, and that some of what I used to think was “being a friend to women” is actually fostering and perpetuating the constant reduction of them as people
- Also, understanding that “programming” is no longer programming once I’ve become aware of it — it’s a choice. And I have the right and the responsibility to reprogram my thinking and my behavior
- Posting my woes to SocialMedia™ doesn’t make them go away. In fact, all it does is satisfy my need for validation that hard things are, indeed, hard, and people care about me enough to click a button
- Friends aren’t friends because you both agree you like each other. That’s just people you like who like you back. Friends have seen the rest of you; the part of you that isn’t on stage each day acting like the you you like to present yourself as, and stick around because they love you and they care
- Some of the best friends I’ve ever had are the best friends I’ve ever had because they cut me loose. I was a danger to them and myself, and they did me a favor by teaching me the hard lessons the hard way. It hurt at the time (and still does), but it was the right thing to do. It’s easier to just put up with someone’s bullshit; when you truly care about someone and yourself, you have to make the hard call
And the hardest one:
- Friendship and love shouldn’t be based on NEED, but rather, WANT. Need is dangerous. It implies that survival depends on this external thing. I should want someone in my life, and they should want me. If I’m incomplete to the point of NEEDING someone else in my life, I’m not 100%, and if I give anything less than 100% of myself to someone I profess to love, I’m doing both of us a disservice. So learning how to love myself is actually the first step in the process of genuinely loving someone else
It’s funny… The more I try to understand the world around me, the more I begin to understand myself. The more I understand myself, the more I love myself. And the more I love myself, the more empathy and compassion I have toward the rest of the world, which allows me to better understand the the human condition, which helps me understand the world around me, which continues the cycle of this growing up thing that is so damn frustrating and hard.
And I just can’t seem to stop myself.
The 18-year-old inside me constantly nudges the 28-year-old and begs him to reinforce his arguments. But this new guy, the 38-year-old… for some reason, his voice just seems to ring out in a way that everyone decides to listen.
One of the reasons I think that’s true is because, the older the voice gets in my head, the more he waits to chime in. He lets all the younger, headstrong, force-driven voices yell themselves stupid and waits until their throats are raw and the fervor dies down. Then he calmly and plainly asks, “Is that all?”
Everyone shakes their heads, and he says “Right. Okay, so here’s how we’re going to do this now.” And with his energy reserves at full and with all the experience that 38 years have given him, he starts plotting a course that avoids the same paths he’s taken before which ended up nowhere (or, worse, exactly where he thought he wanted to go).
And all the other voices can’t really seem to argue against the facts that the old ways didn’t work, and they can’t un-know what they’ve learned, and they aren’t really up for repeating mistakes. “So yeah, fine, whatever new guy, we’ll do it your way.”
It doesn’t always work, of course. But at least I’m learning. And that’s something.
