How To Be An Adult ©, or Choose Your Brand of Loneliness and Live With It.

Sunday I finally looked in the mirror and conciously acknowledged my physical youth is now firmly in the past. Its hard to reconcile how I feel with the way people of my current age (37) appeared to me as a child. Grown-ups were powerful and free, or so I thought. I feel neither, and much more terrifying for the little girl still peeping out from behind a bookshelf deep inside me, the "grown-ups" who people my world are frequently far from mature, responsible or honourable. We are children still, only bigger and stronger and without the innocence which once protected us from much of the world's pain.

Maybe growing up is what happens when you look in the mirror and truly see yourself rather than the image you constructed to protect you from the pain of seeing something less than heroic. Or perhaps it is the lonely moment when you realise people who are important to you may never understand or accept some of your choices, and the only person who can validate them is you. Whatever else growing up may mean, a key part of it is probably just knowing your values and living them as honestly as you can in an imperfect world, because however hard that sometimes is and whatever it may on occasion cost you, its finally become much more painful to live with yourself if you don't.

So am I ready to grow up? I'll let you know.