Growing pains of adulthood

This post took much longer to write than I had wanted. Truthfully, I started it in a not-so-great place, but I also used this as a way to process and think through a large mess of emotions and feelings as I went through smaller periods of these growing pains.

Looking back, honestly, there was a particular moment when it felt like it just came crashing inward. I was in the car on the way home after going to a fun and beautiful wedding. Life is adjusting so quickly around me; my body is telling my mind that it is giving in to the growing pains, and my mind is telling my body I'm overthinking.

There are first challenges of a relationship, maybe the first baby hurdles in the early stages of marriage. Insert raised hand emoji. That's the thing about being young, all of life's lessons and experiences are ahead of you. Hopefully, coming out of that, you learn communication skills or how to understand your emotions and other things that will prepare you for the next hurdle, and lessen the growing pains.

They’re the pains of major life transitions like getting a new diagnosis, which hopefully doesn’t happen too often but becomes a lot more real as we get older. For me, for example, I got diagnosed with my illness a very long time ago, but navigating it as an adult is very different from managing it when I was younger and in college or as a child.

The questions of whom do I tell and how do I tell them become a lot more real. The baggage it carries every time a doctor asks if I am ready to get pregnant, and don't get me started on the thoughts or anxiety around that. I can only imagine the entire process of pregnancy should be defined as one large growing pain (pun intended).

And then, of course, inspiring this post, there is something that I have found can be very hard to deal with: the signs of aging in our loved ones. This includes seeing not just the physical markers like wrinkles around the eyes or gray hair, but also receiving sad news from the doctor about your parent, grandparent, or loved one and anxiously waiting for test results or updates.

It’s looking at someone who once lifted you up in their arms with ease and is now lying in a hospital bed. Sometimes it’s becoming a caretaker for the one who used to take care of you. I cannot say there is a getting used to it, but I can say the growing pains are here to help build tolerance, or at least that’s what I tell myself as I wipe my tears and calm myself down.

Because the pain of getting through the roughness of this climb makes the next time not as difficult, and when I get to a harder peak, I just hope I have it in me to call on everything prior to still pull above.

I will end on the note that these kinds of growing pains also highlighted the gift that community has been in my life. People to lean on, hear from, advise, laugh with, cry with. It's a reminder that no, I am not doing this by myself actually, and I hope this post is a reminder to you that you are not either.