#I missed this phase as a kid and I’m living wonderfully now as an adult | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

mychaptersarebeautiful · 3 years

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You’re too young to be stressed!

You sit on a throne of lies.

This is such a hurtful and insensitive thing to say, especially to someone who’s developing so fast it’s hard to know which way is up. No one says to a twenty-year-old who’s having a heart attack, “you’re too young to have a heart attack!!!” The CORRECT thing to say is, “I’m calling an ambulance right now.”

And who came up with the threshold in which someone feels stressed? Is it printed on the back of your license when you turn twenty-one? Do you have to register? Is there an 800-number to call? Because I want my money back if it’s optional.

When you’re a teenager in high school: schoolwork/homework, family, friends, the presence/lack of relationships, and God knows what else someone goes through in their own life. If you tell someone, especially an adult you trust, that you’re feeling stressed, that response is NOT a good enough answer. You are a living, breathing human being who’s going through life on the same big rock as the rest of us. You qualify for stress.

When you’re a preteen or younger: you also have school, homework, family, friends, and maybe you’re learning about love and what you think about it. What I said about teens also applies here: your body and mind are in the development stages and there’s things your body is doing (also for teens, which I meant to say in the last point) that don’t seem to make any sense, but somehow you’re expected to deal with it.

Unfortunately, there’s no fast forward through that phase of your life and it sucks. It’s a crucial time that you’re learning about who you are, what you like, who you like, what interests you, and what kind of person you want to be. I’m not going to just say, “oh, don’t worry. It gets better. These are the best years of your life. You’ll miss this in ten years. You’ll look back and laugh.”

Ha. No.

It sucks and it seems like forever. Let’s normalize letting young people know that they can vent to adults they trust, seek help when it’s needed, find outlets for their frustration. If adults can do it, so can teens and kids.

Don’t let anyone tell you what you can and can’t do (DISCLAIMER: WITHIN REASON. PLEASE DON’T BE A NUISANCE BECAUSE YOU FEEL LIKE YOU CAN). If you’re burned out because you’re getting assigned more hours of homework than there are in a day, talk to someone if you’d like. Take a mental health day. Take a bath and use bath bombs and candles and nice soap. Do what you need to do to keep from ripping your hair out (DISCLAIMER 2: PLEASE DO NOT RESORT TO SELF DESTRUCTION. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE).

I love you guys. I’m amazed at the number of people checking out my stuff. I hope my mistakes and overall hot mess I call my life can help someone realize their worth, have a little more patience with themselves, or at least bring a smile to their face. If someone thinks you’re too young to experience basic human emotions/reactions, they need a nice, heavy biology book in the face (DISCLAIMER 3: PLEASE DON’T HURT PEOPLE BECAUSE THEY’RE DUMB).

Keep being wonderfully you. ❤️

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lighthouseofthewanderess · 5 years

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Childhood

According to UNICEF: Childhood is the time for children to be in school and at play, to grow strong and confident with the love and encouragement of their family and an extended community of caring adults. It is a precious time in which children should live free from fear, safe from violence and protected from abuse and exploitation.

If it weren’t for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, I would’ve made a movie about myself. The curious childhood for Priya Bala. My bestie from school, Uthra, always said that I grew up too fast. When others were doing silly stuff, I was being an adult. And the more adult I needed to be with time, the more childlike I got. I don’t particularly regret it; it was what I needed to be to survive each phase but lost years are still years. I was constantly out of sync, and learning to swim even before I sprouted feet.

I was in 4th grade when I found my mom in the kitchen past midnight. She was staring hard at the stove, in the burnt yellow glow of a zero watt bulb. When I rubbed the sleep from my eyes and looked at her from the shadows, she had a knife in her hand. My 10-year old body had a 20-year old mind. I walked up to her and took away the knife. As if the puzzle pieces didn’t need to fit for me to read the picture I took a deep breath and set into motion the next challenge in our life. “Mom, divorce him. We don’t need this dad.” Ok, maybe the phrasing of ‘this dad’ was like a 10-year old. But I meant the words. I knew this much that we had moved from US to Chennai only to give this marriage another shot. I also knew that there was no love in the house, just struggle to keep a broken bond from breaking further. It was unfortunate that she was given this man as her husband and more so that I was given this man as my father. If this was the person by relation we had to make ends meet with, well, we were better off alone. I had seen mom do a hundred super stuff and this was easily something she could brave. Till day my mom says, “You showed me a door when I thought I was all walled in.” And till today I’m really glad we both walked out through that door, hand-in-hand.

This was just one of the things that got stuffed deep down inside me. I wanted to cry, I wanted to show what I felt for my dad. I wanted another dad; I wished this hypothetical new dad would bring gifts from the places he visited on work like the other dads I knew. I wanted to be proud and show off both my parents. I didn’t want to be strong, I wanted someone else to take care of me. But I understood reality all too well, always have. Mom had me and I had her. I had pushed her in a direction and I would be a fool to not be there when she needed me the most. And so I became her pillar of strength. ‘You’re my amma’, she used to say. What she expected her mother to do, I did -- for the longest time in life. When our visa was about to expire, we decided to make that a student visa. That meant mom had to write TOEFL and GRE. I made flashcards for mom and sat with her through the nights, helping her practice. When she was feeling sleepy, I would make tea and ethuse her with stories of how we’d earn our permanent residency. If I shut my eyes, I can remember the cold carpet, the spot by the window where she sat and the warm cup of tea I handed over to her. Life was wearing us down to the bone.

When we went grocery shopping, mom was torn between the life she wanted to give me and the what life she had to settle for the time being. She would see me gazing at the clothes section and would ask me if I wanted a new dress. Pretty pink. Trims. Satin sashes. I could count the number of outfits sitting in my wardrobe on my little fingers. More than ten was a luxury. Now’s not the time. And it wasn’t that I was simplistic. I yearned for more. Toys. Books. Underwear with bows. But I knew this part of life wasn’t meant for that. That time will come too, and when it does I will be able to relish it more because of being held away from it now. I shook my head and smiled at mom. I reassured her she gave me everything I needed and that she was a great mom. The look of relief that washed over her was more than enough for me. I think through these trying times, the only worry she had was if she was being everything I needed. Mother. Father. Friend. Family. She needed to be all that. And what she didn’t know was I had to be all that as well. She never voiced it, but I the only way this two-woman army was going to work was if she had a support system too.

I forwent all the childhood drama over sleepovers and best friends. Or better put, I stuffed all that emotion within me. If there was a get together of people, I instinctively found myself drawn to the adults and their conversations. Comic books. Pencil books. Sidewalk chalk. It felt trivial. I had seen the real world, and I got a headstart into fitting myself there faster. The first rule of doing this was building a wall around you to keep yourself safe. This was the only logical reason why adults didn’t act out of character. They didn’t process emotions like children because they never felt them in the first place. It stayed outside an invisible circle and I needed to do that. I remember the moment went my wall was built. I had gone to a jungle-themed arcade. There, someone was standing on an inverted bucket and pulling a hoop around them - bottom to top. And when they did, a huge balloon closed over the person. My wall wasn’t going to be made of bubble but doing that again and again, I could visualize my safety wall.

The next thing to be done was not say everything you meant. The defense system had to work both ways right? If you’re going to keep yourself safe from fires, you also have to not cause any back fires. I would count to ten, and calm myself down. If I still felt angry, I hit a wall. I pushed over things in my room and cleaned it up later. I did have my outbursts, especially over men, but they were over adult stuff mostly. Someone not showing up at grandpa’s funeral. People bullying a classmate because she was American-black. The 9-11 attack. I was so used to hanging around the adults and people older than me that things they considered as problems were the ones I classified as problems too. In doing this I ignored clear indicators that were problems for my age. Abuse. Bullying. Anxiety. Neglect.

In my eyes, I was already an adult. And I was pretty sure life only got harder, my problems were peanut-sized. The shit was yet to come. How wonderfully wrong I was. When I hit 18, I mentally prepared myself for the real world to hit me with its biggest punch; it just didn’t come. I spent 3 years waiting before I realized that the hard times were already over and I had sailed straight through it because I was rock-hard inside. Then I learned to finally let go. Cotton candy. Elaborate sleepovers. Balloons on birthdays. There was this landmark moment where I discovered what a bobble head was. It was stuck onto the dashboard of someone’s car and I just couldn’t stop myself from poking it and giggling. I did that for almost an hour and everyone around me found it kiddish. It didn’t feel odd to me at all. In fact, I felt that I had earned my pass to childhood now, not then. Yes, earned. Not something you take for granted, but something you look forward to for good behavior. I bought dominoes just to set them off, collapsing over each other. While cooking I let things get messy, my hands dripping of brownie mix. I did ballet in the bathroom, slipped and fell. I made my mistakes, I bawled my eyes out over boys. It still was painful but not as painful as I remember my early years to be.

Luckily, I had the eyes to pick out other Benjamins. Those with young bodies and old souls. With them I could strike deep conversations and feel at home. Neha Kriplani was one of those. Together we fretted over our little stomach bulges, but we also stressed over the meaning of life. The importance of gratitude. The slightly complex books that were like bibles to decipher what life had dished out to us earlier. We shared the need to be understood, accepted yet try and do the normal things. Sometimes we stepped into things that were exciting for other people our age and found that a night in over some chick flicks was good enough. Give us bottle of Glenfiddich and a coloring book - we’d spend hours in silence still building that bond we had. Trauma, I found, had this immense power to make you stronger and age you within. It gave you the option to switch between two parallel lives in the same timeframe; a blissful chameleon effect. It widened our outlook and removed the glittery filter over the world. We saw it for what it was and we said ‘Bring it on, I’ve seen worse.’ Trauma brought people together, in ways that therapists wished they could.

Till today when I find myself really low that’s the same thing I say to myself. You’ve been through much worse, this too shall pass. And when you have a dialogue like that with life, you only come out stronger. So did I really miss out on childhood? Maybe not. If the phrase ‘there’s a child in all of us’ stays true, then it also holds true that we’re always living our childhood. It’s just lucky for some to have done adulthood first. Because now we have the spending power and freedom to gift ourselves things we always wanted as kids. That had more value than powering through the early years, half not remembering most of it, painting a pretty picture of life and finding out the bitter truth when you’re all ready to conquer the world. I see kids today living out their childhood with glazed eyes and think to myself ‘they have no idea what’s going to come their way.’ That innocence is bliss, but it only saves you for one quarter of life. I don’t want to burst their bubble and tell them ‘Hey, you need a fortress not this bubble shit.’ But then again, how life tells them that is their story. Not mine. Here’s my definition of childhood: the few years in your life where you’re lucky if you’re surrounded with a family, truckloads of love, and a safe space to find yourself. If not, then it might as well be an army boot camp but you’ll turn out fine, soldier.

#nanowrimo #nano writing #nano 2018 #writedaily #writers #wrimo #loveforwriting #day10 #writing challenge #life story #lifestruggles #life stories #anecdote

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