Another birthday just past, another year older and supposedly wiser, but I don’t feel that way. I acknowledge my growth as a human, I know how to handle things better, I know I have grown from when I was a 15 year old, but I don’t feel older. I’m a grown-up now and I do grown-up stuff, like paying bills, signing contracts, getting jobs, getting health insurance and all those other boring but necessary things, but I honestly don’t feel like an adult. I see some friends getting married, others having children and some who have just bought a house, and I compare them to the movies we have all seen about settling with someone and creating a family, and I can’t believe that my friends are at that point already. I feel like it was just yesterday that I was in high school and was acting a total idiot, I mean we all still act like idiots around the corresponding people, but it’s surreal. Now instead of seeing those weird and stuck up adults that complain about their jobs weird and stuck up, I can actually relate to it. I no longer relate to the kids that saw their parents as always busy and rejecting them, but to the parents that are actually always working because they want a future for their child. This all makes me so melancholy because I know my life has moved on from an era and is beginning another. That a part of my life has already passed and I will never experience anything the same way again.

Being a grown-up, I have come to gather, is exactly what I have described before, realizing that you are moving on from yourself, that a new you has arrived. Gradually you have changed into a completely different person and although your core traits are still present, you manifest them in other ways. Growing up is the act of always evolving and learning, but a grown-up knows that that is the way and they’re okay with it.