Growing up is a lonely thing

Growing up is a lonely thing. Your friends start to drift away, you don't have enough time to see them anymore or they, you. You have to get a real job, get something happening, get out of your parents house and that takes up a whole day to do. You have to run errands more, get things happening more. You have to start utilizing your entire energy reserves to make a decent life of yourself. Once you get home, you wonder how some people can manage to juggle a social life and a working life as well. Growing up is lonely because you realise that you are the only one you can count on. You feel how dependent you have to be on yourself when you are alone in bed, at 3AM thinking about all those warm, summer nights drinking red wine with friends, laughing on the floor, romanticizing about how rich and successful you were going to be. The future was for romanticizing, for imagining. But now, it is against you. The future is something you have to simultaneously work for and against.

I remember everything from my past. I knew that the future lay ahead of me and that it wasn't all going to be easy. But now, everyday i live my life and I think, "This is it". This is LIFE. And although i know that i'll go through many different phases in the future. Some triumphant, some dull, some terrible. The moment i wake up and make my coffee for the morning, is somewhat the entirety of everything that i am. The everyday mundane things are what makes me. Going to the toilet first thing in the morning. Looking at myself in the mirror. Making that coffee. They say events such as getting married, having children and growing old are the milestones of life. Nobody ever tells you that it is these seemingly banal things which also frame your existence.

Although I don't have all the accoutrements of one, I like being an adult. But it is isolating. Remember how often you'd be amongst others when you were young? It seemed as if your entire life was spent with others. Sleeping over, going to the shops, eating at Macdonalds. There was never a time where you would truly be alone, sitting with the cold, hard reality that is who you are and how others see you as a pure individual. That's what you are when you're an adult. An individual, devoid of your upbringing, your social set or your socioeconomic status. Once you are an adult, people expect you to have shed all that you've resented growing up with. They expect you to be a person of your own creation. Growing up is lonely because you get used to being very underwhelmed and nothing feels exciting anymore. Is this the mark of being a true adult? Where you feel so unperturbed by everything because you've seen it all too many times to be surprised?