As a child, I wondered why growing up was so dreaded. If aging meant being able to ride a roller coaster because I finally reached four feet tall, or being allowed to stay up past nine o’clock like the rest of the adults, I, if anything, looked forward to being older and wiser. I had yet to learn about the responsibilities adults had to carry. I didn’t yet know how troubled the world was.
Since then, I’ve grown up substantially. I’m in college now with student debt staining my name. I’ve spent several nights questioning my career path in the humanities. I’ve wondered how many people I would lose in my lifetime, and I’ve thought about the people I have lost already. I’ve wondered how many ailments I’d acquire — how many more diagnoses and pills I would have. Most of all, I’ve wondered if I would be happy.
Happiness and growing up did not correlate to me. At nine, I could no longer hold my mother’s hand at the grocery store like I did at seven. At thirteen, I could no longer watch Saturday morning cartoons in my pajamas because that was something ten year-olds did. At eighteen, I could no longer cry in public because at eighteen, I was an adult; I was to appear to have a life that was built in solidarity and without weakness. Somewhere between being born and now, I was expected to swap everything I was for something I was expected to be.
But I’ve grown up substantially. I’m nineteen now, and of all the things I have learned about growing up, the most important is this: growing up doesn’t have to mean growing out.
Aging is a collection of years and experiences. It is not, as society says, a trade of one age for the next. It isn’t switching bowling shoes because you’re a size seven, and a size six doesn’t fit you anymore.
When you cry because your day has been a little too rough, that’s the four year old you. And when Ryan Gosling captivates every part of your soul in the millionth viewing of "The Notebook," your sixteen year old self is emitting from you as you wipe away the ten-millionth tear you’ve shed since the first time you’ve seen it.
As the years continue on, you are not only seventeen. You’re seventeen, and sixteen, and fifteen, and every year before seventeen. This accumulation of years is what aging is. It’s common sense if you think of it, but if this was so easily understood, “act your age,” would be a more difficult phrase to counteract.
Enjoy the Saturday morning cartoons when life allows you to slow down. Find bliss in squishing sand between your toes and tipping the bag of chips back to finish the crumbs. Happiness, as I’ve learned, is found in the little things that were once enjoyed at younger ages.
As the years add on, you’ll be thirty someday. You’ll be forty-five, and you’ll be sixty-two. But don’t forget to let yourself to be twenty-one and fourteen and three from time to time. Allow yourself to grow up, but don’t ever grow out.
