#19: Growing Up

Subtle, then suddenly not.

Yosemite Valley, CA at 4:30AM. Thought would be a nice cover :)

Growing up is so weird.

I am 23 and sometimes I look back and wonder just how much I would relate to my 18 year old self. Probably not a lot.

The past 4-5 years have been intense in that regard. Hell, the last year has been so crazy.

I think the biggest change that happened during adulting, which I consider 19 years onwards for me, was that I started thinking critically for the first time.

The truth is, that up until even the last year of college, I was very impressionable, meaning my opinions were just a reflection of either my parents, my professors, friends who I thought highly of or the society in general.

When you’re impressionable, a lot of what you consider right vs wrong, important vs unimportant is just a reflection of what you’ve absorbed either through social media or the people around you.

And that’s fine. Being impressionable during the early years of your life is not a bad thing. After all, the world is a scary, complex place and we need our north stars to guide us through, lest we lose our way.

And educated, independent opinions need knowledge, experience and perspective. At 15 years of age, few kids have the drive or the privilege (in time and/or money) to gain that knowledge.

---

But now at 23, I feel as if I am shedding all those impressions that I carried all this while.

All those assumptions of how the world is and/or ought to be are dissolving, and replacing those assumptions are perspectives that are hopefully not only more educated but most importantly, my own, based on my personal experiences.

It is always very hard to tell at the time but all our experiences become a part of our identity. Our travels, the people we meet, our joys, our sorrows, everything we live through changes us, even if just a tiny bit.

And there are degrees to the change too. Sometimes we may change what we think - our opinions and beliefs, But other times we may change how we think. For example, I believe that the past few years have made me more empathetic and self-aware, almost giving me a new lens with which I now view the world. That’s not just a trivial opinion shift (what I think) but a perspective shift (how I think).

And these changes are not concentrated in epiphanic moments. You can seldom pinpoint a time when a switch flipped and you said, “yeah, that’s when I really evolved.”.

Rather, we change bit by bit. And it is only when they inevitably compound over the years, that we gasp and wonder if we would even recognize our past self.

Like I am doing now.

---

And sometimes that springs tension.

Because, as we grow up, we are continuously interacting with people and forming relationships that may necessary not grow at the same rate or the same direction as we have.

On the one hand, we reminisce those relationships, cherish those fond memories, the tomfoolery, but on the other, we know that the same jokes don’t make us laugh anymore. We miss the times, but we’ve also outgrown them.

And the same goes with people.

Kevin Hazzard said something in “Thousand Naked Strangers” (a morbidly funny book, by the way) that stuck with me. He said, “Life is a series of cycles, each nothing but new people, new memories and eventually, a new ending.”

And indeed, life is a cycle of meeting new people and having great experiences with them, only for things to change, and for those relationships to come to, if not an end (because that seems too dramatic and final), a kind of natural homeostasis where you like to believe you’re as close to those people as you were at one point in the past but are not really. Of course, the best friendships are the ones where meeting after years transports you back in time, and it feels as though nothing has changed, but sometimes things do, and that is fine.

No matter how close you are to someone, there is a point where your paths diverge after which no amount of closeness can guarantee the same growth vector in the two people.

And sometimes these vectors are so far apart that they can make you a stranger to anyone who knew you only in the past and has been out of touch since.

And it is for that reason, I sometimes find it uncomfortable to share my writing with so many of the people that I was so close to in the past. I am scared that they only know version of me, frozen in time and that they’d find this growth alien and hard to reconcile with what they know. But that is the nature of growing up - your best friends at various points only catch a glimpse of your journey and are then invisible to the rest.

In his interview with the Morning Brew, author Chuck Klosterman, had an interesting spin to this thought, as it relates to social media. He talks about how hard it has become to grow intellectually today, when we engage so much with social media on a daily basis.

And that’s because whatever we post, write or endorse on social media, doesn’t grow with us. On top of that, instead of a few friends knowing a ‘version’ of us, almost anyone can, which is a unnerving. We risk being labelled fake or hypocritical but we really aren’t. We just evolved.

---