Coming Of Age
A secret I couldn’t solve for a long time. How I could be doing grown-up stuff maybe, but how to truly be grown up, a great mystery!
Being a grownup, that’s the job of those who have already grown up. But at a point, a point of dreaded change, I have more in common with them than I used to look up to.
Still, there are goofy grownups, stern grownups, respectable grownups and idiots and role models and walking warning signs and complex individuals paving the ways of society.
As a person of his mask, I am always looking for an ideal, some golden thread to follow. I have mastered many areas of life with this strategy, for better or worse.
But I couldn’t figure out how to be a real grownup, which all humans seem to become eventually.
But then I found it.
The thing that makes a grownup grown up, despite varying age, silliness, vocational position or family configuration.
It is the amount of responsibility one takes on.
It makes sense, that a 16-year-old moving out is more grown up than a 25-year-old stretching their legs under the loving parent’s table and even the same person can be a grownup at work and a child-per-definition at home, in the absence of responsibilities. That said, becoming a parent should result in one of the greatest responsibilities of a human.
Some responsibilities are handed over, some are bestowed upon, some are lying around, some are more and some are less highly regarded.
The universal traits of the average grownup, be it a lack of goofiness, being weirdly organised or thinking twice, are only a reaction to the assumed responsibility, of whichever kind and whichever place.
Responsibilities don’t exclusively affect the outside world, though. There is an oftentimes neglected part of a human’s life, which is better off being graced by immediate responsibility and even care. And that is our inner world, the lifelong journey of discovery into our depths and the response to what we might find.
In the past years, I had much inner evolving to do, in terms of assuming responsibility for what I found out about my inner workings.
A child gets its world built and in turn builds its world.
And thinking of it as world-building, at some point I had to learn to live in the grownup world I’ve been cooking up inside my brain. With the funny twist of not adding that very brain into the grand equation.
Wouldn’t it have been “the responsible thing to do” to plan out that world with the highly specialised perks and inevitable limitations of the autistic brain?
If only I knew… Or did I, in fact? Because I built many parts of my inner and outer surroundings to be autism-fit already.
But do these function with standard requirements of a perceived grownup? Or do they rather fit the characteristics of the life of a child?
To make sense of this mystery time and time again, I like to remind myself that being a grownup has no other determinator than the amount of responsibility resting comfortably on my shoulders.
And my, have I grown evolved lately!
