A few days ago I visited an art-hub, a five-stories building near the heart of the city, small chambers on each floor containing the minds of artists who were brave enough to let people tread the sidewalk of their thoughts. There were colours, splashing here and there, in shapes and not. Faces that I was not sure whether they were real, then flowers, then sorrows, and then some joy. I found myself staring at an artwork for too long, pondering as I read the artist’s description on the label over and over again.
All growth comes with a price. You take and you give, you love and you lose, you learn and you forget. It’s the slow acceptance in embracing all that life has to offer: the joy and the suffering and everything in between.
It stroke me on a broad daylight, this thought: to grow up is also to outgrow things, and I have outgrown many over the years. I no longer love the band whose songs I used to put on the background everyday in my childhood bedroom, I lost the contacts of most people I met during the earlier years of my life, what I used to like I don’t think anymore interesting now. Old friends have become too distant a memory, my hometown has turned too foreign to call home. I have made peace with them, I have accepted the self I was and the one I am becoming.
It is true, I have outgrown too many things and accepted them, except one set of things: my fears.
The ones that came to me when I was five, nine, twelve? I still have them all now, even when I am already much closer to my first university degree than I am to high school years, nearing twenty one years of age, having moved out of the city I grew up in. Life has grown bigger around me and I have encountered many new’s over the changing seasons, and yet my fears stay.
I have a lot more than I would like to admit. The five year old me was afraid of being left; the nine year old me was scared to her bones of being alone for the rest of her life (this fear has tamed itself inside my body, but it’s still there, just less raging, though the thought of my loved ones leaving me always triggers a grief I know I will never be ready to handle); the fourteen year old me was scared of failing her academics (this fear is the seething blood in my veins, always banging on the door, begging me to tame it over and over again despite countless unsuccessful attempts. I have failed more than the world can see); and then some more that I tell the void, sometimes, or keep them inside the box that is my head, untouched, dusting, only coming up to the surface on harder days.
To tell you bluntly: I am scared of growing up in a way that I am afraid of never outgrowing my fears. It has been a decade or some after the first time they came to me, and yet my knees bloom a new bruise every time the triggers are pulled. I wonder if someone around me feels it too, this fear of growing up not in a way that I don’t want to be an adult dealing with adult responsibilities, but rather I don’t want to grow up having the fears of a fourteen year old despite appearing in an adult body; with the skin of a girl who seems to never get lost and know it all despite struggling to find a way out on unspoken nights.
Unfortunately, growing up does not come with an escape route. It only asks you to walk, and walk, and walk forward with occasional pauses (which still wears you out too, sometimes, for the grueling guilt on the face of capitalism — we shall talk about it another day), and little to no time to catch the sun rising and sinking each day. I cannot run away from this fate of growing older and still facing the old monsters from my younger days. My fears are dormant volcanoes on many places all over me, on my shoulders, resting in my gut, choking my neck when given power. There is a long history written all over my skin, like the lines on the trunks and branches of trees, the wilting and the fresh terrors, past scars and never-healed bruises.
I cannot, yet, make a way out of them all, as if they were bushes getting on my way, but there is an ounce of faith beneath my chest that still, stubbornly, believes.
So I hold onto it even when my fingers have turned red and my feet sore.
(The trees, they might not be as fearful as I am, but I hope they would sit with me and share about what it’s like to have their leaves falling and the snow wearing them out of colours for months. I hope they are scared too, sometimes, despite standing tall and tough. I hope they’d tell me about the gentleness in growth.)
