Growing Up In Adulthood

  "Old and set in my ways."

  I hope I never hear those words comes out of my mouth.
"Can't teach an old dog new tricks" but... "you learn something new every day"-- what??
I can honestly say that I'm just now really growing up and I'm forty-four years old. Yes, I have a developmental disorder, so it kind of goes without saying that some of the growing up that came so naturally to others at a much younger age, would be delayed greatly and more challenging for me.

  Yet here I am learning and growing, and even growing up in ways it might have been thought before, that I'd never be able to. I guess I had a lot of wrong teachers. By saying that, I don't mean wrong with a period on the end-- I just mean wrong for me. Wrong for me-- the examples set before me with too much subtext I couldn't read. Wrong for me-- the standards I was told to reach for without explaining them in a language I could understand. Wrong for me-- a society that expects everyone to reach adulthood after existing for only two decades.

  I work my brain overtime trying to figure out what makes a good way to live life from what doesn't. It's exhausting but I do the work. I'm no workaholic when it comes to the labor under which I get paid, and let me just clarify, I'm a hard worker no doubt, but do not wish to live only through my career and my duties at home. But as a thinking person, I am a workaholic. Even when I'm sleeping and dreaming, my brain is trying to work through problems in my perspective of the world around me and within me.

  I can't begin to express to you in words how angry it makes me to hear people say they know everything they need to know already. Are you dead? Are you God? Have you slipped into a coma?
OK-- yeah there are plenty of times when I just loop and over think things, and second guess intuition or sabotage a great thing because my mind dissects it until it's just a gross and unrecognizable blob of its original form. But my real point here is not that everyone should have an over thinking brain like mine. It's that no one should ever come to the belief that they no longer need to know more than they already know, and guess what? Growing up is not just a child's job to do. Growing up does not end just because you've become a parent or a grandparent, or just plain old.

  Age does not automatically graduate you from student to teacher. I learn from the young as well as from the older. I learn from my own children. I've taught my parents things and older siblings, as they have taught me. I've taught my husband who is nine years older than me, and he's taught me too. We continue to learn from each other throughout the years, and I am a better person every year than I was the year before because I refuse to put limitations on my growing up.

  People don't change? Yes they do. They do if they choose to do the hard work. I am living proof of that. Anyone who has known me even for just one decade can tell you that I am not the same as I was 10 years ago. Old and set in your ways? That's just plain laziness. It's stubborn ego and fear of finding out your way might be wrong after all. It's giving up on yourself because it's easier.

  That being said, I am not one who believes you can do anything you set your mind to. As mortals we do have limitations and we should be realistic about them. We should respect them. I've seen too many people set themselves up for epic failure because they had unrealistic goals with no clear plan of how to reach them, and without even asking themselves if they had the skill or talent necessary. Some of those people died young because of it. If you're a firm believer of everything happens for a reason, then surely everything that doesn't happen, also has its reason.

  I've been in my industry long enough to have met several people who no matter how much they set their minds to learning hair-- could not comprehend what was necessary to be good at it. And because we don't have enough conversations about not having your whole life figured out by the time you're 20 or even 30 and 40, and make sure our young ones know it's OK to change your mind about the direction you want to go in several times-- or that career and money should not be the ruler used to measure whether you're succeeding at life, a couple of them gave up on themselves completely. But in trying to reach an unreachable goal, I hope the ones who didn't give up  on themselves learned enough from that failure to grow from the experience. I hope they didn't stop trying to learn something new just because they failed at one career in their adulthood.

  Don't ever get old and set in your ways if you can help it. If there's something you've always wanted to know or understand, try to. If you think you could never change the way you see certain people, or laws, or even religion-- challenge that. Be a student and a teacher for the rest of your existence on this planet. It can change your life in ways you never imagined, just for daring to do more than you're expected to. More importantly-- it could change the lives of other people who needed you to keep growing up in order to reach them.