We get taller, we get older but do we ever really grow up?

Someone once said, "you make plans and God laughs." Religious or not this saying makes the suggestion that we are are merely pieces in a game that we have no control over. Our lives are predetermined by someone or something else. I hated this saying because I am a rebel. I am uncontrollable. I am wild. Everything I have ever wanted, I have gotten. I beat the odds. I prove people wrong. When I am make plans, nothing and nobody will stop me from completing them. I am a survivor. 

Then, I turned 22, and my plans were interrupted, and that something or someone did laugh. Everything I knew and believed was tested. My hopes and my dreams were ripped away from me. Without them, I felt worthless - less human. The life that I had carefully fought and built fell apart. My frantic attempts to hold it together failed. The 20 year old me would've slapped the 22 year old me and called me pathetic.

I just got tired of fighting. I guess I always thought that once you were an adult, life would be easier. But at 22, I was still fighting the same fight. 

There comes a point in everyone's life when you're officially an adult. I didn't know it, but this was my time. Either I needed to wear my big girl chonies or be homeless, starved, and in debt. It's almost like I had been acting like a grown-up for so long that when the time came...I wasn't ready to be one. I had an incredible urge to run and hide under my bed, to have a curfew, to have rules....anything but bills and work and hardship.

Becoming an adult is quick and messy. You turn 18 and suddenly you're old enough to vote and engage in adult activities. You think you've got it all figured out. You are invincible. A bad ass mutha-effer. Then you turn 21 and your old enough to drink. Somewhere in your twenties real life happens. Suddenly people expect you to be responsible, serious....a grown-up. & for the first time since you turned into a delusional teenager, you realize being a grown-up sucks.

I started to look at other peoples lives - not judging their lives - but considering them. I realized that everyone I knew was experiencing the same situation as me but with their own struggles. I wasn't such a failure after all. This realization comforted me and I began to rebuild my life. This simple attempt at life after complete failure was my first step as an adult.

In some ways we grow up, we have families, we get married, divorced but for the most part we have the same problems we had when we were 15. No matter how much we grow, age, we are still forever stumbling, forever wandering, forever young.