My age is not my own

    When I was growing up, my parents often would brush off any questions of mine with, “You’ll know when you’re older.” I’ve come to the realization that I still don’t have a lot of the answers I was promised would come with age, and am more or less in the same position as back then. I genuinely do not feel as though I have learned anything that would set me apart from myself as a child. Putting aside the very obvious concepts of knowing how to hold down a job, do taxes and any other “adult” tasks are not really what I’m talking about here. Knowing how to do all of those things is great, genuinely, and it does help people as they get older to know these things, but I still feel as if I’m lacking heavily when it comes to life experience. A child can even learn how to do extremely complicated math if you teach it one singular subject, which is how I feel about the things I do and don’t know. I know the basics of things that come with being an adult, but I can’t apply any of them in the real world. Another common phrase that’s passed around while you’re younger is “Some things come with age.” I’ve spent a long time trying to figure out what those “things” are meant to be because as I analyze my life up until this point, I believe I’ve only lost things. I’m aware that part of this feeling is influenced by my constant drowning in nostalgia, but I can’t help but feel that I am in a more infantile position in my life now than when I was not even in preschool yet. I am extremely immature in the way that I go about life, and I have not the slightest idea how to change that. I understand that the concept of living long and acquiring more years lived under your belt has a direct relation to the experience of the world around someone, but I’ve never felt that to be personally true. The experience that I do have does nothing except feed into the idea that I am a child surrounded by adults in terms of maturity and understanding of the world that I live in.

    I never viewed becoming an adult as an accomplishment or the opening of a new chapter of my life. Each year added to my own age came with a weight I am still not prepared to bear. I’m not sure if it was how my childhood was or how my parents built the base for my view of the world, but this year I will be turning 23 years old and I am unable to comprehend that I am older than 15. To me, it’s as if the world is moving at a slower pace than I am. Those around me take steps in their life’s journey 10 minutes before I even think of making my own. Feeling so hopeless and left behind like this when it comes to age and life experience is hard to get across to someone who doesn’t understand the feeling of how heavy time can weigh on the back of someone, so there aren’t many people that I have ever made myself vulnerable with enough to tell them these things. My birthday, and the concept of growing up and the new responsibilities that come with that paired with it, was never something for me to celebrate. While I did attend the birthday parties of those around me when I was younger and somewhat recently, I never seemed to feel the same joy when my day inevitably comes around annually. I can count the number of times I’ve celebrated my birthday on one hand and the number of times I’ve enjoyed it could be accounted for with both hands at my sides. It’s hard to enjoy something meant to be a celebratory event when you can’t do anything but think about what’s been lost in the years leading up to it.

    The innocence of being a child is genuinely what makes nostalgia such a dangerous drug. Realistically, I would take the understanding that whatever portion of my life I’m feeling nostalgic for is being viewed through rose-colored glasses and not spend more than a second moment thinking about it. This is not how my brain or anyone else’s brain works, unfortunately. Just as I sit here being 22 daydreaming about what my life would be like if I could be 17 again when I was 17 I was daydreaming about being 13. With the depression I’ve carried with me for the majority of my life, nothing will be enough or as good as the past. I go through life walking backward, glamorizing a part of my life that I would do anything to be a part of again. It’s hilarious really because the world I’m so jealous I’m not a part of anymore I hated it so much when I was experiencing it. I was being used by the people that I loved, and while I was accomplishing a lot of things, I was feeling awful about it nearly every second. I was even worse than I am now when it came to copying others’ traits and personality since I was not even aware of the mental issues I faced with it back then. The biggest factor that plays into why I am self-aware enough to understand that I would hate living that life again, is that I was still living with my parents and going through high school at that point. High school wasn’t a bad experience for me and something that I wish I could forget, it’s just that doing the classes again would be the closest thing to hell that exists. Living with my parents on the other hand is something that I would not want the period I hated most to go through. While I was a child, living with my parents was exceptionally horrible in its own ways, it seemed to mature into still being horrible, but in other ways, as I went through being a teenager. That is why nostalgia is so dangerous, but the fact that I am fully aware of that cannot help me to move forward immediately. It is a long journey to be able to live through life walking and looking ahead, and I’m not sure if it will happen to me in the near future, but I am trying to make the steps towards reaching that future each day.

    I stated earlier in this post that I truly feel as if I am not older than 15, and I’d like to expand on my feelings and explanations for why I feel like that. The things that I have been through that influence feeling like that would take days to get into properly, so I will try to summarize it by only touching on things that have happened in the recent past. With the recent page being the previous 10 years, I can say with absolute certainty that my parents are the main thing that has caused me to feel this way. More than anything, the way that both of them view the world has been something to weigh on me for most of my life and something I can’t seem to figure out how to get rid of. Throughout my life, until I was about 19, the only world that my parents showed me was one of absolute solitude. My mother specifically, because she was incredibly vocal about feeling lonely and was sure to explain to me why she felt that way. As my mom told me these things, nearly every other day, they joined my already pessimistic view of the future and caused me to have the belief that once I grow up I am going to be completely alone. This concept was, and is, why I am so deterred by the fact that each year I become older regardless of how much I wish I could avoid it. I didn’t want to be alone so badly, that subconsciously I brought that reality to meet my own. I pushed people away from myself because I had this deep understanding that in the end all of these people will leave me because once I become an adult, I disappear from the lives of those around me. Obviously, this isn’t true in the slightest but that doesn’t stop me from believing it to be a dangerous fault. Though, I did come to the terms with how insane it was to believe something so wholeheartedly only very recently, how I acted and treated those in my life can’t be excused. I didn’t treat others in a rude way, rather I kept everyone at arm’s length, no matter how pure their intentions were for getting closer to me. It was easier for me to keep everyone away from knowing me personally than to take the pain of having a close friend ripped from me once I became an adult. This caused me to go through my teenage years into my 20s with such intense feelings of loneliness that I felt as though it would crush me to death almost daily. All of these actions of mine while growing up created a domino effect that changed everything for me. Everything that I feel and experience as I go through each day is influenced heavily by everything that happened previously. I wish I knew what the key was to understanding the human psyche without becoming a doctor so that I can change myself in a way that will make my future one that I will look forward to without all the med school.

    My mother’s view of her own reality is not the only thing that had an impact on me while growing up. Something that had almost as much of an impact on me as her view of the world, was the neglect I endured. When I say neglect, I don’t mean that she was withholding food or water from me, but rather that my mom never pushed me or helped me get to where I needed to be. I was never able to experience being a teenager because of how my mother heavily influenced my stagnant state throughout the majority of my life. I have always been a shy person, but you grow closer to those around you as you experience life with them which should’ve helped to combat those feelings of being shy. Unfortunately though, because of the hold of a future with complete isolation had on me, I never allowed myself to let anyone close. To this day, I feel as though I am still learning how to create meaningful relationships with others and how to allow myself to be vulnerable around others, but for as much effort as I put into that, I always fall back to square one. Even if I was possibly close with someone, I don’t have the faith that I would be able to even recognize that I was close with this person. How I experience being friends with someone is so tainted by my past that I don’t know what is the first step to remedying that so that I am able to one day be genuinely close with others. There are other factors that play a part in why I feel the way that I do, but that’s for another post. Though, feeling this way about being friends with others is not the only thing that my mom’s neglect had on me. Her neglect caused me to be incredibly behind on multiple things that contribute to living through your teenage years properly. Two things, in particular, were the largest contributing factors to feeling like I wasn’t moving alongside everyone else at the same pace. Those two factors were the fact I was never given any support or help when it came to getting my license and that I did not have a room that was my own in the house I was living in. The “room” that I was given was anything but. I had one growing up, but as I turned 13 and continued to grow the “room” that I was stuck with was a room with torn wallpaper and a mattress on the floor with not even a dresser for anything of mine. The things that I owned were not displayed for me to see and show my friends proudly but instead kept in my room in plastic clear tubs. As the reasons that I didn’t feel like I owned a room added up, it resulted in me not allowing more than one person over through the four years I was in high school. This feeling of not having even a room to call my own led to feeling a disconnect from myself and everything in my life. After experiencing this So, since I had no home to bring friends back to, my option for growing closer with others is to go to their houses, but I had no license. Everything that happened to me as I grew up and developed my own ideas and beliefs, was a perfect mixture for one of the loneliest routes I could take while growing up.

    All of these things come together to form the “me” that I am today and the world as I experience it. Feeling a disconnect from myself and everyone else around me does nothing but make me feel as though I’m the only one in my life. I observe the lives of others as they experience their own reality, and I have yet to see someone who is as empty and disconnected as I am. There is not one thing in my life that I am genuinely tied to, so I just float through life not gaining any experience or people close to me. How can others grow close to someone who is nothing but an empty shell of a person with no understanding of their own definition of self? When there is nothing that even you are able to latch onto, how is it expected of others to latch onto you? Each day, I am trying to find the solutions to fix these problems, so that I am able to move forward so that I am able to feel better connected to my reality. Something as simple as my age being something that I feel no relation to makes the journey to having my problems fixed seem that much more daunting. To me, my age has no meaning on a deeper level than simply physical age which is concrete in its definition. I might be turning 23 this year, but as I said before, mentally I don’t think I am going to age past a teenager just yet. I find myself lying about how I’ve gone through life up until this point. Pretending that I have been through things that I haven’t but simply daydreamed about, or observed others experiencing, has become somewhat of a skill of mine. There are so many things that I feel as though I just will never experience or begin to understand on a personal level. My bucket list is so long, simply because I have trivial teenager things weighing the list down. The idea that I am a mature person who has lived a life worth living for 22 years is something that I am chasing every single day of my life. No matter the amount of care and love others possibly show me throughout my life, I still feel as though they are looking at me through a judgemental lens and want me to prove myself to them. Just the concept of feeling like I am not enough for those around me and that I have to prove that I am worthy of being their peer is so childish and it’s unfortunate that it’s not something I’m able to shake off as I go through my early 20s.

    Feeling disconnected from your age is something I’m sure many people experience, though our reasoning for why we feel the way we do might not align perfectly, it is still a common experience. It not being a usual thing to feel does not make it any easier to deal with or open up to others about, though. I’m not sure what steps I’m meant to take until I reach a point where I feel like I am genuinely the same age as those born in 1999, which makes it difficult to try and end this post in a way that isn’t entirely unsatisfying. There is so many things that I missed out on experiencing while I was growing up, that now I would not have time to finish all of them in a timeframe that mattered. I do believe that no matter how much effort I will put into pushing myself to match the pace of others that it will not be enough. That isn’t to say that I am not going to try going forward, in fact, I’d say it’s the exact opposite. I have been trying countless things for years, and I will continue to try things as long as I’m able. While crossing the finish line at the same time as my peers are not something that I am capable of doing in this life, crossing it in my own time still is. It’s hard to not think that everything I’ve lost while going through life is not just a waste, but I do know that regardless of how I personally feel that none of it was a waste at all. Any effort put into trying to better my own life is the opposite of waste, which is why I continue to try and find solutions even after failing time and time again. To give up would be a genuine waste, which is why I work every day to face away from reality like that. Everything that I’ve been through has influenced me and my view of my own reality, but that does not take any blame away from me. In fact, I believe that being continuously held back by these types of things only goes to further prove the fact that my reality is in my own hands and to continue letting myself drown in nostalgia is no one’s fault but my own. The past cannot be changed, no matter the amount of time I spend staring at it and wishing for it too. As long as I stay fixated on my past, my present will remain the same as well. Writing this out to better understand my own feelings towards my age, reality and self has genuinely been helpful, but I cannot allow myself to wallow in what could have been like I have allowed myself to for a few portions of this post. My reality is in my own hands and I have to mold it into what I want.

    This post is quite long, so I’m going to begin to finish it here. I did not mean to delve into a rambling mess at the end, so I’m sorry if it’s slightly difficult to understand what I’m trying to get across in that last paragraph. While it makes sense to me, I understand that it might not to someone who might happen to lay their eyes on this mess of emotions. At the end of the day, I don’t feel the age that I am, and seeing myself age while my mental state remains in place terrifies and saddens me deeply. I genuinely am not sure if there is a point in my future when I am going to feel as though my age and my actual age align because of all the catching up I still have yet to do. Vocalizing these troubles though is what generally is the first step to working towards understanding opportunities to find solutions in front of me, and what steps to take to start my journey to those solutions. There are various steps that I am currently taking in order to do certain things that might solve issues of mine, but as of right now I am not seeing results, which is normal. The things that will actually help me out of feeling the way that I do are not things that can be started and completed in a day. Working backward and then forwards to rewrite over years of depression eating away at my views and opinions of the world around me is a journey that I believe will take me most of my life, however long that may be. There are views of the world that I hold when I forget my own existence, such as the idea that simply being alive is a gift in and of itself. When I place myself in the background, and simply view the universe as it is, I am able to understand how beautiful everything is and how being able to view the ethereal creations before you is what makes living have meaning. Though, this view of the world is reversed as soon as I begin to consider myself, changing me to viewing my own existence as a joke and something that should not be. I believe that if I ever reach a point where my view of the world excluding me and my view of my own reality finally overlap is when I will more or less lose the feeling of being disconnected from everything around me. I know this won’t happen anytime soon, or if it ever will, but as I said before it is worth it to continue to try to work towards that future. As I begin to understand and love myself, there will be something for me to latch to so that I gain the ability to define myself in a way that means something to me. Those later in my life that will then be able to properly latch onto me and go through life will be an extra gift alongside the understanding of self that I will work towards. Every step that I take is continuing a journey I started years ago when I first noticed this incredible disconnect. I don’t know if I will ever reach the theoretical end of the journey that I have created in my head, but I will continue to take as big a strides as I can toward a future like I have dreamed of having.

    It is a hope of mine that one day I am able to celebrate my birthday with people I love around me; and as I blow the candles of my cake out, I won’t lie to those around me about how I feel about the day we have all come together for. Instead, I view the day as it is, an incredible celebration of life and connection with the world and people around me and I feel genuinely happy because of it. Joy will rush through every part of my body, and I will think about how I have gotten to experience another year in a reality that I am blessed to live. When my loved ones begin to clap as the smoke rises from the blown-out candles, I will begin counting down until my next anniversary with the universe.