Catherine L.
Photo provided by Catherine L.
If you’re reading this, your best is enough.
when I was small,
I believed that growing up meant always knowing what to say and do
in the unspeakable, unfathomable, and uncharted moments.
my mother did it all with ease, never skipped a beat
planted a delusional perception of human capability
permanently in my impressionable, dream-ridden mind.
certainly, I thought, she has all the answers.
and once I grew up,
I would get to know them too
like they were a secret
like they existed on some written page in some hidden, faraway place.
slowly, though, the flaws in my calculations became apparent
I grappled with the realization that growing up
is not accompanied by a golden, glistening key
to a locked room containing all of the answers to all of the questions
we don’t even know we have asked yet.
growing up, in fact, is quite the opposite.
it is understanding that no one currently has, or will ever possess,
the right combination of soothing words to string together
when a friend loses someone dear to them
nor a remedy to hush your wailing heart when the loss is your own.
no booklet on how to know when you truly love someone
no method of holding on tightly to friendships
you feel suddenly slipping through your fingers
no justification for why you feel quite alone
despite being surrounded by people who care for you
no manual written, in step-by-step format, informing you just how exactly
to stop hating someone for all the broken things
they’ll never be able to fix.
as I have grown up, I realized being “grown up” is none of these things at all
it is accepting the frightening truth that every person, in every given moment
is taking their best guess.
our choices are rooted in previously developed beliefs and established morals
in actions guided by people we have known and how we have been treated
and how we have treated others
and we scramble and flounder and trip over our words
in desperate attempts to pull a through-line through it all
to demonstrate some sort of consistency
of self-identity.
‘growing up’ is realizing that everyone just pretends
until they’ve convinced everyone around them
and then maybe, eventually,
themselves.
we grow up when we stop pretending.
when we stop acting like we know the exact right thing to do and say and be
when we simply accept that the best answer we can muster in that given moment
is the right one.
Catherine L., University of Virginia
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