Childish Adult.

Not quite sure when it happened but I wasn’t ready for it. Not really. Not even if I was fab at pretending I actually was. One minute I was chasing my brother (or being chased) around the backyard, daydreaming imaginary worlds of awesomesauce and living my life according to parental-set guidelines. The next? I’m chasing money (and it chases me but not in a yay way), finding my imaginings to be a little terrifying and trundling along kinda helplessly without my training wheels. I’m not a complete hopeless case by any means but there is a whiff of train-wreck hovering nearby that requires a lot of neglectful ignoring and blissful diversion to keep at bay. I’m fine, sure, but I can’t shake the feeling that I went to bed a child and woke up a grown-up; that I slept through the part where I mature and learn stuff.

I know too that life is one big crazy hard journey that everyone travels and no single wacky trip is the same. You have to find your own way, face your own struggles, work out what, where or who you love and latch your groovy wagon to this making-it-up-as-we-go ride. No one really knows what to do, no one stops needing their parents or looking to others for inspiration, advice, assistance or companionship. I just find it so weird in my more reflective moods (which happen a lot cause I’m deep like that, yup) I recall with complete befuddlement my childish ideas of where I’d be in life by now, which boxes I’d have ticked and the sort of Lyn I’d be. Without seeming ungrateful; I fully acknowledge that I can look around at who, where, what and count my blessings. Wholeheartedly. But it doesn’t stop me shaking my head in wonder at the ten year old me or the seventeen year old me that thought she could look ahead and predict the winds the road would take. I miss the childish tendency to implicitly trust that things would fall into place. That naïve hope has been tempered by reality and becoming aware of that feels harsh and unfair. 

As a teacher, I see young people at many different stages in their childhood or adolescence and it strikes me on almost a daily basis that the reason I can relate to them (in some regards, anyway!) is because we were all fundamentally the same at those times in life. I feel a twinge of sympathy for those kids that seem so sure of what life holds in store for them but I’m not jaded enough to set them straight. Hard as it is, I guess that is growing up (or trying to anyway); always regulating your expectations, your view of the world, your perception of yourself so that you can still evolve into the most fantastic version of yourself despite well-laid plans not eventuating.