Growing Up by Breaking Down

Growing up is something we glorify,
It agrees with our human resistance to remaining stagnant.
We want to move on to the next step.
We want to be more, to have more.
Our hair, our limbs, our cells are doing it too.
Growing, expanding, multiplying.
Whatever the case, more is obtained.

But lately, I've been feeling some kind of way.
I've been asking myself this question: is growing up actually simultaneous to breaking down?

When I was younger (about 2 months ago), I liked to say, 'When I grow up, I want to....'
and I kept asking myself what I meant and suddenly this was a phrase I questioned.
What was growing up?
Was it my age? My experiences? My physique?

I'm starting to think it's a little more than that.
I'm starting to think that maybe it's a breaking.
A breaking of the mind, the heart.
Sometimes the breaking of yourself.
Maybe we don't grow up, we just break down.

The 'child' who believed that the world was good, that people were not mean, they simply made mistakes. That life is fair and everyone does the right thing - and if they don't, that they acknowledge it and apologise, was suddenly abducted when a 'grown-up' told me that my ideas are too 'utopian', too 'unreal', too 'CHILDLIKE' for this world.

And that was it.
That was the moment I became an adult.
The moment the child started to die.
There seemed to be no place for them to coexist.
The child growing up into an adult also meant the child breaking down into...nothing

But here's the thing.
I think it is impossible for the child to be completely buried.
The child and the adult are not separate.
The child is forced to evolve into the adult, but traces of the child will remain.
Sometimes the child resurrects to the surface and other times the child lies still as if dead.
But for as long as the adult exists, so does the child.

So I guess we are all adulting children. The child in you had to exist before the adult could be formed.
And what does it look like to be an adulting child?
It is knowing that the world may show unkindness, but remaining loving anyway.
Knowing that people can choose to be mean but choosing to be kind anyway.
It is being aware of the hatred looming but spreading love over it.
It is growing up but keeping the child alive.

Allow the adult to form, like a seed breaking out from beneath the soil. But never let the breaking lose you the child, because the child is at the core of who you are. Where you came from is just as important as where you are going.

~Nala👑