growing up
At some point we realize we’ve grown up. We look around and realize we’ve hit milestones. We’ve gotten married, we’re watching our best friends start families, we’re chasing careers that we spent years preparing for, we have our own kids, we’re building lives that we once only dreamt of.
For years, we get excited. We dream of the plans, and the careers we’re chasing, and we compartmentalize. We graduate college, and chase that career and those goals during the week, and spend weekends celebrating our “adulthood”. We do the mundane minutiae at work, and we celebrate the weekends with lighthearted fun, living for the weekend. Then something shifts. We realize we’re not doing mundane at work; we’re finding projects and goals that excite us, we’re chasing work that makes us proud. We realize pipe dreams and careers we talked about in college are suddenly only the beginning. We realize what’s important to us, and we start growing up.
With all of the excitement that comes with building a life, comes the hard work, the pain. We collect baggage and we try really hard to ignore it. We try to keep celebrating life and leaning into the good. We forget how critical the hard moments are. We forget the pain that comes with hard work and why it should matter. Suddenly for me, life shifted. I had a lot of baggage, and suppressed a lot of emotions. I lost my self-assuredness. I lost what mattered to me in a constant race of trying to keep everyone around me happy; to keep their status quos. I let friends take advantage of that and quickly realized it was time to change, time to grow up.
I was raised with the notion that anything worth having was worth working for. So I took a step back, painfully, from my world, and I started the work. I said no to things, I prioritized myself, my husband, and I worked for what was worth having for me. A career that fully gratifies me, challenges me, and goes beyond what I ever dreamt I could do. A life filled with people who celebrate all of my baggage, all of my scars. People who chase the magic, and show up without any questions, or expectations. People that I would happily walk through fire for, because we’ve been through the work and know that life can be hard. Summers filled with quiet moments outside, catching the breeze or staring up at the stars. Holidays, doomed by a pandemic, that somehow become so special — quiet and perfectly filled with joy. Most importantly, the spark of starting a family; dreaming of the day a tiny human would look up at me, knowing I’m the most important thing in the world to them.
Like I said, all of a sudden, we grow up. We look around and we realize how special it is that we’ve come this far. That we’re starting families and that we’ve been lucky enough to work hard to chase our dreams. Lucky enough to have people in our lives that don’t waver. Lucky enough to realize that it’s still only the beginning. So in a sense, we choose to grow up. We choose to get excited about the next milestone, to look forward to the work that comes with growing up. To feel the magic that comes with building a fulfilled life, surrounded by those you love and getting excited to chase the next dream.
