(006) In between.
I write stuff on this site called 750 Words. But uh, I probably shouldn't be doing it at 3 AM.
Nowadays I often find myself in between child and adult: some awkward thing caught in mid-metamorphosis, standing on shaking legs and looking out into a world where there are both children and adults and not feeling like part of either. It's a singularly uncomfortable feeling because humans are innately wired to be pleased at belonging to something, and if you don't belong it is like missing a definition.
I am an adult by the legal definition. Even then, I am not sure when one crosses the line from child to adult, when one becomes suited for appearing like the 'adults' I see in supermarkets, out on the streets, in their cars, in the banks, doing their adult things in ways that I see as differing from me. I see very little in common. But maybe something that can be seen as adult is an understanding of mortality; in more poetic terms, the fleetingness of life. As children become adults, they realise that the adults around them are mortal beings just as flawed, just as much seeing themselves as children, just that much closer to disappearing. I hate how days seem shorter and move twice as fast, how everyone is getting slower and greyer and leeched out of colour. What a childish thought that is, thinking that the adults around you will stay forever to guide your way into what can be simply put as adulthood itself.
I am a child, I think, by my own self-definition. There is this small, irrational checklist in my head of one needs to have done, needs to have owned, needs to have realised before they can join the club of the adults. I still giggle at some aspects of sexuality. I'm still utterly baffled by some aspects of physical and emotional touches and how that all weaves together into the quilt of two people interacting, sliding themselves together in so many ways (missing each other, craving each other, being cruel to each other, etc., etc., etc.). I still stare at my parents' paperwork of taxes and insurance payments and mortgages and, while knowing in the logical part of myself that this will be me, irrationally thinking that I will never understand. I look upon people who can cook well as strange beings who are able to, in the silliest words there are, to 'take care of themselves' and not rely on others to be taking care of them. Then I realise that so many other adults have these same paradoxical problems and wonder, exactly, what it is to be an adult. Is it that adulthood is only continuing childhood but with additional responsibilities and the inability to fool yourself into thinking problems away? Even then, there seems to be some quality of 'adultness' that I have failed to grasp.
Nowadays I often find myself in between child and adult: some awkward thing caught in mid-metamorphosis, standing on shaking legs and looking out into a world where there are both children and adults and not feeling like part of either. It's a singularly uncomfortable feeling because humans are innately wired to be pleased at belonging to something, and if you don't belong it is like missing a definition.
I am an adult by the legal definition. Even then, I am not sure when one crosses the line from child to adult, when one becomes suited for appearing like the 'adults' I see in supermarkets, out on the streets, in their cars, in the banks, doing their adult things in ways that I see as differing from me. I see very little in common. But maybe something that can be seen as adult is an understanding of mortality; in more poetic terms, the fleetingness of life. As children become adults, they realise that the adults around them are mortal beings just as flawed, just as much seeing themselves as children, just that much closer to disappearing. I hate how days seem shorter and move twice as fast, how everyone is getting slower and greyer and leeched out of colour. What a childish thought that is, thinking that the adults around you will stay forever to guide your way into what can be simply put as adulthood itself.
I am a child, I think, by my own self-definition. There is this small, irrational checklist in my head of one needs to have done, needs to have owned, needs to have realised before they can join the club of the adults. I still giggle at some aspects of sexuality. I'm still utterly baffled by some aspects of physical and emotional touches and how that all weaves together into the quilt of two people interacting, sliding themselves together in so many ways (missing each other, craving each other, being cruel to each other, etc., etc., etc.). I still stare at my parents' paperwork of taxes and insurance payments and mortgages and, while knowing in the logical part of myself that this will be me, irrationally thinking that I will never understand. I look upon people who can cook well as strange beings who are able to, in the silliest words there are, to 'take care of themselves' and not rely on others to be taking care of them. Then I realise that so many other adults have these same paradoxical problems and wonder, exactly, what it is to be an adult. Is it that adulthood is only continuing childhood but with additional responsibilities and the inability to fool yourself into thinking problems away? Even then, there seems to be some quality of 'adultness' that I have failed to grasp.