Growing Pains

I think one of the worse aspects of growing up is the pressure to choose - choose what you want to do, but also what kind of person you want to be. For those who grew up without stable role models, this might seem particularly hard. It’s difficult to know how a good person behaves when you haven’t known many. Nobody is perfect, so you’ve got to decide what you want to work on and what you’re willing to live with. Although I know I’ve got my lifetime to do this, the world is speeding up so much and I feel left behind - one of the worst emotions, I think, is loneliness. Being separated from your peers because they aren’t really your equals. I find, sometimes, that on top of stress about being broke and college and friends and family I feel a swirling anxiety about the world itself. About how little control I really have. It comes up primarily when I feel really lost, when I begin thinking about life and death because I’m so scared of what comes next and I don’t know if I’ll be able to make it. Then I feel the urge to, at the very least, have control over myself.

I lament, too, how the world swells so suffocatingly during the transition to adulthood. As a child, Sunday afternoons merely evoked a warm mystery to me: the world was cozy yet full of adventure. I now feel jaded, like I know the world. As an atheist I don’t think there is much beyond humanity, and it makes me sad. Yet life and all its garbage feels all the larger for how much I depend on it. How much I need college and money and marketable skills, even with all the social and political issues I may rebel against. Life feels so scary and yet empty. I’ve become more interested in politics because it feels like the only way to do anything good for the world. I've learned much more about the inequalities facing the economic majorities and ethnic minorities, and that brings me despair as well.

In the great disillusionment that is adulthood also bends love: this mystical force, praised by God-knows how many bards and writers and movie directors, is suddenly challenged by the realities of the first long-term relationship. The love of your life is just another person with issues, and so are you. Maybe you’ve learned to hide your feelings or maybe you’re too excitable. Maybe they wait too long to speak their mind or maybe they chew food like your deadbeat dad. Of course this doesn’t diminish love: some may say it only makes it better because it is continuously tested. I guess it’s just hard to accept how crude life is, far from either magic or sense. It's difficult to adapt to the world when none of the things you value (unless it's capitalism ha) are really present in everyday life. I find that it's hard to be artistic or creative when murder is rampant, when whose family you're born into does more for your life than talent or work ethic. Is all that matters money and politics? With the first you survive and with the second you help others do the same. I don't know.