All Grown Up

Back in September, I entered an essay contest. I didn't win. So now I can post it on my blog.

A few days ago my friend told me about an essay contest in a magazine. The challenge is to write about the moment or event that happened in your life that made you feel like you had become a grown-up. It's really got me thinking. What has happened to me that has made me feel "all grown up"? I'm not sure that moment exists. I grow. I learn. I have matured, but am I a grown-up? That seems like an end, a finale. Some days I feel like an adult, and other days it blows my mind that I'm closer to thirty than I am to twenty. One day I will feel accomplished, and the next I will feel lost. All grown up? No. That moment does not exist to me. I am growing. I am an adult. A child's spirit and an old soul both reside inside of me, and both are always learning from the other.

I felt grown up when I had my first "real" boyfriend, then realized how little I knew about love until I met Greg, and I still feel that there will always be more to discover about him and about love.

I felt grown up when I got my first job, but I understood what a true work ethic was years later.

I felt grown up when I stayed strong in front of my father when he was in the hospital having heart surgery, but I felt so little when I broke down once I got back home.

Maybe feeling grown up doesn't come from one pivotal moment. Maybe it reaches us like ocean waves- at times a moment of adulthood will crash into you, and if you don't dive under, immersing your whole self into the wave, it will knock you over. Then at times, maybe the tide is so low that no matter how far you reach out, you can barely reach the water, or you can only test the water with your big toe- too timid to just run in, because the high tide might roll in and overwhelm you (grown up situations can be scary). It ebbs and flows. It comes and goes. Adult. Child. Grown up. Lost. I am all of these. Perhaps it is this understanding- that the title "grown-up" doesn't have to mean I'm done growing- that has made me realize that I actually have become a grown-up.