Growing Up Is An Odd Kind Of Magic

Lately, every meaningful thing I try to write just comes out angsty and bitter. Maybe it’s my wounded inner child stealing the pen and demanding the page for her tantrums. Sometimes, it feels like the Universe is plagiarizing my teenage diary and throwing lessons I already learned back at me, just so I can relearn them and feel stupid for taking twice as long to come to the same conclusions that I effortlessly already knew when I was 14 years old. 

I miss being a child. I miss having the superpower of seeing the world in black and white. All the shades of gray that come with adulthood are just distractions born of society’s ignorant standards, arbitrary rules, and fears of breaking the status quo. Sifting through all the gray to get back to the truth you once knew so well is exhausting. Why do we do this to ourselves? 

Growing up is an odd kind of magic. While you may lose sight of some things, you develop 20/20 vision of others. It’s like suddenly, you’re able to see things for what they really are. You can look back at what occurred when you were a teenager, and you realize how genuinely messed up those situations really were. You forgive yourself because you were just a child when they happened. You realize that they happened to you, not because of you. 

Then you think of all the adults around you who saw what was happening to you during those times, but simply turned a blind eye because they couldn’t inconvenience themselves by getting involved. They couldn’t pull their heads out of their asses for long enough to do what needed to be done. I hope I’m never like that. I hope I’m never someone who is too self-absorbed and preoccupied with shades of gray to notice a child drowning right in front of me. 

We need to do better. We owe it to the younger versions of ourselves who went unseen, as well as the generations still climbing their way out of that same darkness we escaped. So, here’s to growing, and not only up. Let’s grow in every direction we can and hold onto that magic for as long as possible. It just might be the one thing that saves us.