Adulthood + Growing Pains

May 8, 2023

It is no news to you that adulthood has not been everything you thought it would be.

Adulthood is lonely, especially after a pandemic and quite a few large life changes. It is hard to make friends. It is not like when you are in school. You cannot sit next to someone in class and chat about what you are doing that weekend and suddenly be spending all your weekends together. You cannot walk to their dorm, just down the hall from yours, and ask them if they want to go to The Hub with you to get coffee and study. You cannot run to their room after a bad break up and cry in their arms.

You saw a reel on instagram the other day from a woman talking about a friendship that had faded and you tried not to cry at work while feeling her words a little too deeply. Last week you saw a reel with another woman talking about the phrase “we were girls together” and while you have never used that phrase, her reel really hit home. She talked about how lovely it is that they were girls together and they will always have been girls together. They taught each other how to braid hair and talked to each other about their crushes and classes. They will never not have been girls together, but the relationship was gone due to the passing of time, and that didn’t make the relationship any less significant, it just made it one in the past and not in the present.

You are learning a new definition of friendship and how important it is to pick the right friends, even if they are only in your life for a couple of years, even if they are just a blip on your timeline, they are still so important, and you are so important to them. You are learning how to make new friends and mourn the loss of friendships that did not follow you into adulthood.

You are coloring your hair the color it was when you were young and healing your inner child; allowing it to show a little bit more every day. Allowing her to breathe and cry and laugh feels like seeing an old friend. She has been in there all along, you just needed to find her again and set her free. Making friends for eight year old her, twelve year old her, eighteen year old her, twenty-five year old her.

There are a lot of growing pains in these years. You are growing and healing and learning. You are doing just fine.