People change. We will always change, whether we resist or ignore. This can be hard for those who cling to the past-you you no longer identify with. People will call you angry when you’re calm because you used to be hard to sit with. 

Or they’ll call you impatient, even though you’ve learned to wait. Growing means moving away from people of the past.

They say the straightest path is the quickest, but have you ever gone into a house without looking in any of the rooms? Aren’t you curious? Isn’t it interesting?

Moving around and experimenting is so important because then you find out about the world. 

Growing up is realizing no one really knows what they’re doing. Adults never held some sort of secret knowledge of how to exist. Everyone is just making it up as they go along. 

Even though people are making it up, they like to tell you they’ve learned something. But maybe the trick is to stop learning and start sitting. People are so confused, so afraid, so messy. We sometimes forget to just sit with it. 

Society hates the contempt of stillness. It means you’ve accepted a world you can make better. So, we make goals, but right before we’ve achieved them, we move the goalposts further, pushing ourselves further and further from that contempt, so we don’t even see ourselves growing. The problem is that growth without contempt is a fool’s victory. 

People like to give you life advice as they watch you grow up, but I come from a belief that advice is a better reflection of the person giving it than the one taking it. I believe you can only truly give advice to your past self, but we can’t do that, so we tell the next best person, finding similarities or clinging to our averageness to the people who listen.

There will always be people who feel like they stick to the edges of the bowl, onlooking an unlived normalcy in a crossroads of pleasing others or doing their own thing. And terrified either way. Here’s my two cents: I believe people should be weird. People should do weird things and find themselves in weird scenarios. We should find some sort of solace in our differences. Because being different isn’t wrong; it makes us interesting. To understand someone, but not be them at all is completely fascinating.

But, how can we understand someone who tells us all the wrong things? How can we listen, but still learn for ourselves?

People will tell you to go to college, get a job that makes you a lot of money, or to learn certain life skills. This can be helpful. But all I hear is that as we grow up, we have to become someone. We have to achieve. That even though we keep shedding skin and regenerating this body, we should ignore the soul we’ve always been. We’re expected to. We’re needed for. We’re opinionless about. What they don’t tell you is that this creature that has been buried deep within your chest will outlive all that. It has a much older hunger: passion.

“What do you want to be when you grow up?” they ask you. 

I have learned that the answer has nothing to do with earning medals in the Olympics or becoming a firefighter. No. I want to be strong. I want to be curious. I want to remember. Sometimes we surprise ourselves and we’re the core we never thought we’d be.