Growing Pains

Reflections on a year gained

Growing up is relatively easy. It’s measurable. It’s also pretty unavoidable. Life is defined by piano tiles of dark lines etched onto the kitchen wall, relatives telling you just how big you’ve gotten, and a new pair of shoes and school uniform every year because, yet again, it doesn’t fit anymore. Most hardship, most of the little ugliness of life can be put down, in some way or another, to growth. 

“You’re still growing.”

“She’s just going through a phase.”

“That ache in your wrist? Bless, darling, that’s just growing pains.”

Something about society’s treatment of growth changes once we stop physically growing. While we stay in motion, absorbing and fluctuating, all of the physical markers are lost; change is inevitable, but it’s just less perceptible to and less acknowledged by the world around us.

That doesn’t make growth any less complex. It takes all of you. There’s the overwhelming knowledge that you stand at the edge of your own fig tree. Countless lives pass by as you sit. Moreover, you’re now at an age where it takes a reasoned choice to prepare for this. You lose your parents, teachers, and much of the structure of your life. Now, there is no one left to do it for you. Life has already started; if you’re not ready, you will miss it completely. 

There’s a counterbalance to this, the haste to get going and be ready for the world. It’s an awareness that any step into your own future, you can’t take back. We can never become younger, more innocent, more naive, not without undoing the progress we’ve made. This knowledge, to me at least, can be excruciating. Is everything that I learn, every person that I meet, taking me further away from the girl I once was? Is every new experience just another step away from the comfort of childhood, of safety and reliance?

How do we know what to shed from ourselves, what to hold onto, which parts of ourselves to stay true to? There must be some fundamental aspects to one’s personality that stand fast, while the rest slots in place around them. Or are all of us in flux, changing throughout our lives by situation or by conscious choice? 

I suppose the real question is, how much of ourselves can we keep as we grow? Privileged to get to watch some of my best friends grow from children into teenagers and now pseudo-adults, I’ve found different archetypes of growth in all of them. Some, like butterflies, transform from one creature into another, recognisable only by the colour of their laugh or a quirk in speech ingrained since age six. For others, the transformation is so entire that they can only be described as a phoenix — dead one moment and completely reborn from the same atoms in another. Most people, I think, are like house cats: ageing gracefully into a larger, near-identical version of their younger selves. 

In a town that seems stuck in time, unchanged as we are by each semester, it’s funny to reflect on what a year has done to me. In some ways, it has felt like a year-long settling down and easing in. In others, the change has been so intense that I’ve felt like a scraggly teenage boy, limbs stretched out of my sockets in seconds, hiccups and voice cracks abound.

Ultimately, I like to think that this year has been one of evolutionary growth. A snake, say, shedding an outer layer of scales, dirt, and dust, emerging a fresh, softer version of myself. Closer, I hope, to my core. 

The growing pains have been worth it — I think they always are. Don’t stress about the ways in which you are changing, or how, or why. Just know that it will come, and do as well as you can by the person that you want to be.

Even if our growth is unavoidable, it is also important. The pain is a good sign. Like the ache in your wrists, it reminds you that you are in motion and of what you can become.

Image from Wikimedia Commons