I think this is something I have to do.
Growing up is not something that happens slowly over time. Perhaps for some people it might be, however, for me it seems to happen in dramatic bursts. It seems like one day I am in the sun with some friends enjoying my freedom, the next day I awake to the rain and cold to read an email explaining to me that I need to move away and work.
It honestly feels like I am drowning. The best way i can put this down is liken it to learning how to swim. Cliche i know, but hear me out.
Growing up feels like that first summer trip as a kid. You spend so long waiting for it, planning it, talking about it. You get ready a little bit every day in the spring and then eventually that morning comes and you’re in the car.
You can’t help but think to yourself “what if its not as good as i imagined?” And thats just the start of being an adult. What if its not as good as I imagined?
You arrive on the beach and run to the dock, and that fear starts in. You can see the cold dark waters below, and its not the way you pictured it at all. Everything suddenly gets a little colder. Your breaths a bit shallower. All you want to do is go back home to bed, to see your friends, to play on your street.
Your parents tell you to jump in, you’ll be home again to soon. So you close your eyes and jump. As your feet leave the ground you feel that weight in your stomach just like when you ride the roller-coasters, it drops, and you can barely hold your breath. Hitting the water causes your body heat to rise, just that little flush you might feel before passing out and you start to think to yourself “I am going to drown, I need air”. It seems like hours have passed under water fighting your hardest to get to the surface. When you arise you realize its not so bad, and the day only gets better.
That sure seems like it ends well, but right now I am in the “feet leaving the ground” part of that story. The worst part of this analogy is that it down plays the actual time frame of each phase to this ‘growing up’. The story lasts a few days, or weeks maybe the fear the part is a couple minutes, 12 at the longest. However, in life, its years. You will spend years waiting to be an adult. You will spend years feeling like your stomach has dropped out, and your face is flushed as your about to pass out. You will spend months thinking “I am drowning” and then when you make it through you will never be able to go back to that street you grew up on. You will never be able to play with your friends the same way.
In life, when you leave, you can never go back home.
I have left, and now its all falling down around me, to keep going i have to keep leaving. I left home, and put up with school. Everyone said it would be better when it was over. I got a job and everyone said “its only 6 months, it will be so much better when its over” Now I am getting another job, and again i hear “in 6 months it will be so much better”.
Does no one realize that I can’t keep hearing that phrase? I don’t want to wait 6 more months. I have waited 8 years shouldn’t that be enough?
Why is it so hard to accept that I just want to give up. I don’t want to wake up another day just “make it through” i dont know how many of those days i have left…
