To Feel Free

And now, adulthood

My name is Alexander, I'm turning 18 tomorrow, and I've always had a feeling when I was younger that growing up, and 'becoming mature,' would be like waking up one day only to look in the mirror and see you would be a completely different person. It's one of those things that children make up in their heads to try and make sense of the things around them, it's the same as how I thought that painkillers would make you completely and utterly immune to any and all harm. I used to always walk up to my father and tell him, "Hey dad! I wanna take a bunch of painkillers and jump off the Empire State Building!" Or at least I until I figured out that's not how painkillers work... What can I say? I was young, naive, and my child-like fantasies were the only things that would help me to make sense of the crazy world I was thrown into.

    Then as teenagers, we start to act as if we know everything. We don't simply do this because we're "angsty," or "rebellious." We just can't admit how confused and scared we really are about the world we live in. Even now I'm nothing less than terrified, I'm not ready... I mean seriously, I've never been an adult before. How can I possibly even imagine what it's like? Well to put it simply I can't imagine. Just like you can't imagine a new color in your head that you've never seen before. And it's even harder to know what it's like when you've always grown up alone, with such an age gap between you and your siblings that there really was no kind of a relationship, you never really had the experiences that would typically be the driving factor of maturity. These driving factors are the experiences you share with others, and the lessons you learn with and from them. When you don't learn those lessons you're usually supposed to figure everything on your own, because as a teenager you're too scared to ask for advice. Much like a stubborn father insisting that he know's the directions, even when you and your whole family know you're lost, all because your father refused to ask for directions.

And it feels especially hard growing up moving from apartment to apartment, trailer to trailer, then trailer back to my old apartment, and all the while attending a total of 6 different elementary schools during my early childhood, I was lucky if I got to spend an entire school year at one school. It was kind of hard to make friends and keep them, even then, that is an understatement. And I don't just mean the kind of friend you talk to just because you're in the same class or the kind of friend where all you do is send memes back and forth. No, I mean the kind of friend that always sticks by your side, the kind of friend who you can talk about anything with... I never really had one of those, until my later years of high school at least. I have a few really really close ones now.

See, I believe wholeheartedly that your friends are a very important part of growing up, especially when close to adulthood. The times you share together tend to really shape the kind of person you are, and the kind of person you will be. And my friends taught me that becoming an adult isn't always the same as maturing, seeing as how most of my friends are now adults, legally speaking, and are not in the slightest bit mature, and neither am I. But that's okay because becoming an adult doesn't always mean you have to become mature, not right away at least, no no, you still need to do that in order to become a functioning member of society. But in your adulthood you still have some time to enjoy that blissful youthfulness you will one day wish you had never wasted.

That's why my friends and I organized a trip across the midwest. For a whole month, we'll have no plans, and rules to follow. Only each other and the time we have together... One day I'll fall asleep when I'm supposed to, one day I can forget my teenage dreams and accept the reality that they will likely never come true. And until that day, maturity can wait.