When I was a kid, I wanted so desperately to grow up.
I had it in my mind that being an adult meant that things would finally make sense. I would have learned how to confidently move through the world while maintaining a deeply intimate understanding of all that was me. My deep spectrum of emotions would be something I had tamed into the nothingness for which the world seemed to beg. I would be properly grown up and never have any doubts of how anything was to be, because the rite of passage that was adulthood meant that everything would fall into place with the right steps.
What I hadn’t accounted for in childhood was the reality that all of that was pretty much a lie.
No one really had any idea what they were doing.
Life, in its glorious subjectivity, was a never-ending dance of trial and error.
Being an adult really meant that I was afforded a view of the true state of things without the rose tinted eyes of youth. The issues that had arisen within my environment and within myself did not magically work themselves out because I was older. If anything, they had become more greatly magnified under a deeper level of awareness. I was confronted with the realization of a paradise now lost, and a new path that was meant to be forged in the fires of experiences I would not know the effect of until long after I had lived them. Society had laid out a supposed path that would help one on their journey through life, but I soon realized that this framework was not something that suited all. Where everyone told me there would be answers, I only found more questions and frustrations. I would look to my peers and find myself disheartened by them seemingly getting it, but there was a certain sense of sadness or maybe even settling in those examples.
I craved to find a way that granted me true happiness and the space to simply be — but I found that I didn’t exactly know what that meant. Had I ever been properly happy before? I’m certain there were many happy moments sprinkled throughout my personal history but I found myself getting caught on the darker feelings that had emerged. There were parts of me that I did not fully understand, parts that spoiled the fun like someone else unexpectedly blowing out the candles on your birthday cake. I spent years being tormented by anxiety and depression while experiencing severe but inconsistent bouts of physical ailments. I spent years feeling like I was battling myself in some way. I spent years not even loving myself.
As an adult, I wanted so desperately to be a kid again.
I could remember being happy as a kid. Adulthood felt like purgatory.
There was too much confusion about which way to go, too many expectations to trade precious time for passionless moments that were only about survival and not actually living, too many unspoken social rules trampling personal boundaries, too many obstacles that seemed like a hydra growing an extra head every time an ounce of progress was made, too many people blindly accepting needless suffering as the norm. And every day, month, year the world grew noisier, more expensive, more violent and tactless. There was always a new war being waged on another country, another fundamental right, on the natural world, on our very consciousness. Not to mention the inner wars — anxiety, depression, suspected autism, ADHD that flew under the radar until age 31 (thanks for the gaslighting, medical system). This was not what that little girl imagined when she pictured being a grown up. But the teenager, the one with the first inklings of the horror to come, hadn’t even imagined making it past college graduation.
And yet, here I am.
Now what?
To quote the work of Sleep Token: “I have fought so long to be here — I am never going back.”
With Love,
Nykhia Azostos
