On growing up:

This post is one that I had trouble placing, whether I just wanted to touch on it briefly in my more personal "blog" or if I did indeed want to put this here. 

I wrote this last night, but I ultimately decided to post it because it did mean something to me, and I felt it was important to say.

I have many varying, somewhat dichotomous, interests, and the things I love span from Adventure Time to Canadian politics to DIY fashion, but there is one, overlying common factor: me.

I love them. They're uniquely my interests, and just as everyone has that unique treasured mental bookshelf of favourite books, everyone is coloured differently in terms of what they love, what makes them go.

So I have a list of things that make me go, just as my friend Janine does, and my friend Andre, and they're all different. How different are we? How differently do we experience life? How differently do our thoughts affect our daily comportment? How differently do we mark the different stages of our lives?

How and when do we each call ourselves adults? One of my first posts on this blog, approximately a month and a half ago, was made on and on the subject of my nineteenth birthday. I am legal, yes-- I am now allowed to drink alcohol in Ontario, and a whole bunch of other things that I have no idea about, I'm sure.

But am I really an adult?

The short answer: yes. It happened sometime earlier this year.

The long answer: Yes, but it happened gradually, slowly, and had nothing absolutely nothing to do with my nominal age.

I remember being six years old at Roberta Bondar Public School in South Keys, and being lined up on the wall, watching sixth graders file by. They were so tall, so mature-looking, just about as adult as my parents, as my daycare providers. I imagined, back then, that when I was in sixth grade, I would turn around to look at my past, and see a big canyon in the middle of the road when I suddenly leapt from child to adolescent-adult.

I hit sixth grade. There was no big canyon: I felt exactly the same.

Then I was in eleventh grade, and sitting on the laminated plastic benches around the white lower foyer pillars watching a stream of sixth graders file by noisily for Music Fest at Earl. Their clothes were awkward bags on their own awkward bodies, and I could see now the frizzy hair, the loud way they clung together in large molecular masses to convince others (and themselves) that these people were who they belonged with, who they were.

The canyon was appearing.

Now, sitting at a desk in Rivière-du-Loup: it takes an enormous effort for me to think back to how large and imposing the world was when I was four, five, six, seven, eight. The canyon is grand: my six year-old self is as much as a separate entity is my brother is from me.

So now, am I an adult? Yes, but a new one, one who has very recently shed the egg of naivete and youthful ignorance.

The process itself was-is- difficult. I talked about this recently with friends: how did you first realize that adulthood was upon you? How did you know?

I knew when I wasn't invincible anymore. The differences in how we experience and process our milestones in life greatly affect us, and being that voracious reader that I am, I viewed my entire life as a story. This was not a conscious decision, it was just the way I phrased my internal dialogue, the way I got through certain difficult phases in my life and how it helped me to remember the good ones.

To cope with life, I viewed myself as a permanently benevolent protagonist. Not exactly a Mary-Sue, for I had faults, but as a character who never let her faults affect any part of her life, which is frankly impossible. This changed recently, when I made an enormous mistake that made me realize my own humanity (that I can indeed large errors), and thusly, my own mortality. And then I started to question my self (not myself, but my self) and then the point of my own existence, and ultimately, how we are just so pointless.

This .... final realization is something that I'm still coming to grips with (and talks a bit to my relationship with religion, which I think I will post about later). But it was like playing one of those blindfold game shows where you're playing along with the raucous laughter and the slightly sardonic urging of the host and laughing along as well and prodding something big and soft, like a teddy bear, only to have your blindfold taken off and realize that you were really poking a furious male grizzly bear in heat: it's like really seeing, and realizing that what you're looking at was the void the entire time.

Attaining adulthood was exactly that: this opening of my eyes led to my own awareness of how short, how dangerous everything was.

My life used to be propelled entirely forward by love-- I would go to school because I loved my classes, because I loved the future, I loved my teachers, and I would do art because I loved the catharsis, putting another image to emotion, and so on. But now, my life is entirely controlled by fear: I am afraid of everything because I realize just how little we are, just how dangerous everything is.

So this was my transition into adulthood for me: I scrapped the idea that I was invincible, that I could anything, for the idea that I (and my family) had an expiry date that was due at any moment.

But now comes the long process of learning how to take risks, get messy and ultimately seize each day with everything we've got. This was how I lived the near entirety of my life, and this was the me that I know best, and love. This is the process of learning how to be myself again, as an adult who hasn't lost her youthful spark.

- A