Transcript:
Undergirding my last post is the pressure to “grow up” that I think becomes quite prescient for people once they hit 25 and start creeping closer to that ever bulwark age of 30. It starts to set in. “Are we not where we thought we would be? Doing what we thought we would be doing, and sometimes even being the person we thought we would be?” Even worse, when we look around our peers, which is ever-more exacerbated by social media, we think “wow, how did everything go right for them? How did they get where they wanted to be?” And, of course, ultimately, in our youth, we turn this finger back upon ourselves. “Maybe it’s something *I* am doing wrong?” That is a lot of the pressure and feelings I was going through when I first took that reset in Asheville.
Of course, every 20-something’s colleagues and friends who are later in their 30s, caution people experiencing this anxiety that everything is going to work out and that things will fall into place, but its hard to BELIEVE that, especially when one’s primary circles start to become your peers who are likely experiencing the same thing or you’re getting most of your feedback from your parents, who are likely experiencing their own anxieties around empty nest or their own projected insecurities around who they want their kids to be and what they had hoped for their life to be, as well.
One thing that I kept hearing as this anxiety started to ingrain into myself was that it was soon becoming time for me to start changing myself or “growing up”. But, unpacking this notion of “growing up”, to its fault, it’s so broad. Growing up could range from improving my productivity habits, or becoming more committed. Growing up could also mean choosing the place to “settle”. The breadth of these categories to “Grow up” proved to be exhausted. I found the notion of having to grow up made it harder to accept yourself for where you are because technically you could always be growing up to where you are. And, then what? When do you know that you are grown up? When have arrived?
And, on another more pernicious side of growing up, we recognize that these established ideas of what we think of as “grown-up” are components of a White-American, capitalistic, and patriarchal conceptions of “grown-up”. How much are all the ways we have thought about being “grown-up” and arriving on the path that we thought we would be on were actually us following the stories and fictions depicted to us by the society that is influenced so much by those systems?
Or, is leaning on that argument just denial? Much like how folks who are older often joke about “growing out of my socialist phase” - is resisting the modes of life that are expected of us or that we had dreamed of for ourselves when we were younger, just an extension of a rebellious phase? Is it avoidance?
These are the questions I had been grappling with for the better part of the past few years until I decided to lean more into “growing up” in the way that was perhaps expected of me to “become the person” I wanted to be. But, like I said in my last piece, by the end of 2021 I found myself still so far from who I thought I would be, and even worse, more burnt out and directionless than ever before.
But having just wrapped up a gig running a startup accelerator, and rejuvenated from my retreat in Asheville, I wanted to give it one last big shot. I would use the accelerator principles to accelerate “my growing up” and become the person I wanted to be. That would mean setting clear goals (my questions and categories of life that I would explore), creating an action plan, and being wholly committed to that path. I would do the things that I would need to do to grow up, I told myself. No more half-assing.
At the end of the piece I shared, I talk about a conversation with my friend/mentor’s sister that I think was an important reminder about control. Was I really in control of this growing up process? Frankly, was I really in control of my life? For so long the past year, I was thinking about MY choices, MY decisions, that I wasn’t really thinking about the contributing factors out of my control that led me to the choices that I had made up until that point. Frankly, even the decision to intentionally carve out this piece of time for growth was also a result of numerous forces outside of my control?
Or was it? Had I always been mulling about this? The free will debate is always a classic debate, but in this moment it had significance because the answer affected whether I should continue trying to direct my life or just let it flow.
This notion of growing up also implies this sense of linearity that I could not quite fathom. Are we always linearly progressing? If so, that implies that what was before growing up was worse than now. Does that mean that the 22-year-old version of myself was a lesser version of me? Do we continuously get “better” over time? That doesnt seem like a healthy mindset nor does it seem to reflect the diversity of life experiences out there in the world. Maybe self-discovery is a better phrase than growing up? I don’t know these are some of the thoughts in the back of my mind that I quashed in December so that I could fully focus on GROWING UP.
The stories I will share over the next few weeks and months will be the chronicles as I navigate these questions and figure out: “Yes, am I the person who is in charge of my own growing up? Or is it just a natural process of life that will eventually get me to a place where I recognize that I have changed, that I have grown, and that I am no longer the person I was 10 years ago?”
What Does It Mean to Grow Up?