Life Fright

Growing up, I thought that adults just knew everything and had it all together. There’s a bunch of societal rhetoric surrounding this and I absorbed it like a sponge. “Listen to your elders”, “When you are an adult you can do what you want”, “x years wiser!” are just a handful of the phrases that should not be construed without a conditional clause.

Little by little, year after year, I observed and was stunned by the way I was treated by these adults. There’s so much blind acceptance regarding authority figures and for good reason. In an ideal world, these people are supposed to have your best interests at heart and they are good role models to be inspired by. But that is not real life. Now let it be known that the majority of adults I have interacted with when I was a kid were decent human beings. There are those however that were downright rude, mean, and even straight-up bullies.

This behavior of accepting adult authority should be questioned and not automatically granted. It needs to be earned through actions and time. I wish I knew that as a kid. I was instead indoctrinated into the philosophy that adults are right and children are meant to be seen and not heard. Thinking back on my childhood, I wonder if this was the way it was because it is an easy parenting/supervising style. Total authority and with no objections.

Every day, kids are taking in all their experiences and interactions and acclimating to an ever-changing environment. For instance, there was a noticeable shift around puberty where these adults started to make comments about my physical appearance. All critiques about I had elephant legs, was too chubby, etc. And the volume of these comments just grew and grew. It didn’t help that my self confidence was based on the approval of others so every ensuing interaction was picked apart hours later and I would take otherwise innocuous comments and attribute them to how unattractive I was.

Now that I am much older, I look back at that time and I am just appalled by the behaviors exhibited by these adults. I am still younger than they were at the time and I already knew then and know more definitively now that what they said and did was not ok and just horrible. My child self had no sounding board or real support system so there would always be a sliver of doubt over whether I was too sensitive. Any parts of protest were promptly squashed and dismissed as “It’s a little thing” or “That’s no big deal”. And if the adults or older folks were having a bad day or going through their own issues, I would be on the receiving end of yelling and physical abuse. Ironically, these same people would then make me their reluctant listening audience with their own very similar, parallel situations and expect nothing less than sympathy and help which my naive self delivered and never received in return.

The takeaway from this is to know that adults don’t know everything. Even if they are older. Even if they are established experts. Information is always getting updated and revised, so it never hurts to fact check and do the research yourself to know for sure. There’s so much information at our disposal these days and this information is more accessible than ever. Take comfort in knowing that once you are out of the dependence of guardians, the world is what you make of it. Of course, that involves tackling your childhood traumas and ending the cycle of generational abuse and baggage, but that is a topic for another time. You got this!