Every time you entered a new school of higher education, you looked upon the oldest grade as being incredibly mature and they became your idol. At the end of my seventh grade year, my older sister graduated high school and planned on attending college in the following months. I remember being so jealous that she was already grown up and about to attend the ultimate place of education while I still had a long ways to go. Now, I am finally at that same pivotal point in life that I was once so jealous of my sister being at.
It has only been a couple weeks since I first moved onto campus and began classes here. I have loved every single minute because I am getting involved on school grounds, finding amazing friends, and figuring out who I am and who I want to be. Even though growing up and being in this new and exciting stage of my life has brought me immense joy, I have also gained adult responsibilities that are not something I am fond of; i.e. worrying about money and managing my time between three jobs, going to class, prior commitments, studying, my health, having fun, my family, my friends and household chores (not particularly in that order). It's the bittersweet part of growing up and is not what you dream about or ever what enters your mind as an innocent kid.
You go through childhood wishing nothing more than for life to speed up so you can become an adult. Once those short eighteen years go by, all you can think about is re-living your childhood and wishing you could have slowed time down.
Growing up is such a complex idea. We want it but don't always enjoy it once we have it.
What our society understands "growing up" to be, is something that needs to be changed. Some say we enter adulthood because of the knowledge at our disposal or simply because we become a slave to money. To me, growing up means taking on more responsibilities but in a way that allows you to learn and evolve from those obligations by keeping the optimistic, open and wondrous mindset of a young child. If you simply marry the two perspectives, your younger self and adult self, of growing up, then you will be content and keep that lust for life that is too often shirked somewhere along the line because of adult responsibilities and the pains of "growing up".
