While having dinner with my parents and their friends a few weeks ago, one of them said, “when I grow up, I want to be an artist.” Everyone at the table laughed, seeing as though the comment came from someone who could have been deemed a “grown-up” for at least 30 years. While it was funny at the moment, it made me begin to wonder: when do we officially become grown-ups, anyway? And, why does that mean we have to stop growing?
As I am writing this, there are only two weeks left in my junior year of college, after which I will enter my final year before the daunting age of adulthood in the real world. Being a senior in college always seemed so far off in the future, almost as if it might never truly come, so it feels especially strange that I’m not still a kid figuring everything out even though I still think I am.
I vividly remember being in middle school and being terrified of walking through the high school hallway, where all the students seemed so much taller, wiser and older than I was. Though it’s been ten years, I still feel like an anxious sixth-grader just trying to get to class on time.
Approaching my senior year is also scary because it’s a milestone I have always imagined so differently. When I was younger, I believed that by the time I was 21 I would have my life path completely planned, and basically would have everything figured out. I looked at the adults around me and thought they knew everything, and that they were there to help me grow and understand the world. While 21 certainly doesn’t mean I’ve reached peak adulthood, it does make me feel like I’m no longer a child with someone holding my hand.
Getting closer to being a “grown-up” has made me realize one thing: I never want to stop growing up. I don’t mean to say that I always want someone there to treat me like a child and make sure I’m doing what I am supposed to do, but rather that I never want to reach a point where I feel like there’s nothing else to learn or improve on.
While I used to look at the adults in my life and believe they knew everything, getting older has shown me that, in reality, no one really knows what they’re doing, and they’re still figuring everything out.
I don’t believe there is a certain age when we should tell ourselves to stop having ambitions or goals. In ten, twenty, thirty years, I hope to have the same drive that I have now and that I had as a sixth-grader who was just excited to walk through the high school hallway.
I hope that I’ll always be able to say “when I grow up…” at any age because I’ll never feel like I’ve stopped growing.
