I remember being 14 years old and promising myself I'll become an adult by moving out of my parents' authority by the age of 16. And then I told myself the same exact thing at the age of 16, 18, 21, and even till now. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to stray away from the consistent questioning and approval, which leads into a handful of tattoos and juggling three jobs because all you want to do is be treated nothing more than a mature adult.

It's extremely frustrating when majority of your life you're always the youngest in the group of friends. All of your friends would give you the look of you're too young to understand. You'll get it later on when you grow up. Not only did that enforce an immense amount of hatred towards those group of people, it created a totally different perspective upon myself. All I ever wanted was to feel like my friends and be able to converse about my hardships in relationships and how boring work was. However, majority of 14 year olds aren't able to experience that part of life just yet. My dislike for those friends grew over time and it showed when I was surrounded by a group of friends my age. I transformed myself into an adult where I was giving out lectures and questioning their motives. I even found myself disinterested in most of the activities they were going through. But then I realized that who I was turning into wasn't really me.

I knew that the only reason I wanted to grow up so quickly was just so I could be accepted by my friends who were five to six years older. It frustrated me that they wouldn't explain their situations to me but rather shoo me away with their silence. However, after meeting classmates that were around my age and even meeting my best friend, I knew that I was underestimating my similar aged group. I started to understand what it meant to slow down and be 18 years old, it just took me a while to understand that. Even though I did accept that I was to keep myself in a certain pace, I now find myself in a deja vu of being 14 years old.

At the age of 22, it's frustrating when it's your own mother who needs to authorize every decision you need to make compared to my 20-year-old sister. My mother didn't allow me to move away for that unique college experience or even give me the space I wanted so badly when I traveled to Sweden by myself. The constant where are you questions are a nuisance and a tedious thing to experience when all you want to is independence from parental dominion. All I crave at the moment is to be left completely alone from being treated as a 14-year-old again and be respected as an adult but I know that'll never happen. Mothers are bounded to feel a certain protective skin over their children and I know my mother will never change her ways of looking at me as if I'm still a teenager. So it is OK to feel cramped by parents' eyes. I just wish I wasn't.