Adulthood.

Up until recently, I had been having trouble deciding what to do with the rest of my life, my career and essentially my future. Apparently, they tell me that’s what I’m supposed to be doing with my life right now. With that came plenty of thoughts about the trials and tribulations of growing up, plenty of thoughts I’d always been aware of but never truly examined until I was faced with actually having to grow up. You see, I have this problem with society and that is that society stripped me of my childhood. Melodramatic right? Maybe so, but I’ll still stand by it.

Seriously, whoever established this ridiculous concept that at such an early stage of life you should already know what you want to do with the rest of it should jump off of a cliff. Grown children of 18 to 21 should not already be held responsible for deciding what to do with the rest of their lives. I don’t care what the law says; in respect to life, you’ve definitely got a long way to go at 18 and you are far from adulthood. You want to tell me you’re magically an adult just because you turned 18? Oh, are you ready for a rude awakening. However, it’s not you that I blame for this lapse in judgment. As a matter of fact, we’re taught that we should already imagine and long for reaching adulthood when we’re actually much younger. I’d say when we’re about 4 or 5, maybe even younger.

When we’re young, so many adults emphasize that you should enjoy your childhood, and yet here we are in a world that also emphasizes the moment a child enters school that you should already have dreams and aspirations as to what you want to be when you “grow up.” A child should enjoy their childhood and yet they should already think about growing up? Well, that sounds like a paradox if I’ve ever heard one. How is one to enjoy their childhood if they must always think about their future?

Basically, I’ve come to the conclusion that that’s where we were all screwed over. We were all screwed over the very moment we were asked, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” See, in that very moment we all tossed away our childhoods unconsciously. In that very moment we established that we would never even be allowed to enjoy our childhoods, as so many adults told/tell us to do. Because in that very moment we were told to abandon fairytales and magic and we were told to enter a mundane world where we must constantly think about “adulthood.”