I used to look back on my childhood and long for the days of having no responsibility, of playing carelessly and not worrying about adult things. But when I think about it, being a kid wasn’t as carefree as my sense of nostalgia would have me believe. When I was a kid I was full of worries about the future: I was always terrified of what came next, whether it was increasing difficulty at school or increasing responsibility at home. My outlook on life was grounded in the belief that hardships lurked everywhere on the horizon, and that I should never trust happiness and good experiences because I needed to be ready for the potential bad experiences.
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Before I left for college, I took home for granted. No matter how far I traveled, it was always there when I needed it, and no matter how long I was away, my bedroom stayed the same and gave me that familiar feeling of comfort and safety. When I left for college, I began to realize how important having a home was to understanding my identity. Throughout most of school, I still relied on my childhood home to sustain me—I would emotionally hold my breath until the next time I went home, when I would let out a sigh of relief and reset myself. But gradually, my home seemed to slip away from me…now that I am a college graduate, I no longer feel the familiar safety that it used to provide, and as a result I feel uncertain of my identity.
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In one of my other articles, “The Most Important Separation,” I talked about the concept of separating from our parents’ limiting beliefs and fears. This is also about separating from parents, but in a subtler, emotional way. This is about separating from the emotional burdens of our parents that we take on during childhood.
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One of the most important shifts in our lives is the phase in which we separate from our parents. This phase usually occurs around the time that we leave home to go to college, pursue a career, or just generally go off in search of our own lives. It takes a while to sink in that we are individuals with the power to make our own decisions, and in order to fully own our power and believe that we are self-sufficient, we must break from the childhood ties that connect us to our parents (and build new bonds with our parents based on a more adult relationship). This may sound like an obscure concept, because once we go away to college, etc., it seems obvious that of course we are separated from our parents. But it’s more complex than that. Separation entails breaking free from the worldviews, fears, and expectations of our parents that don’t fit with our own. It is normal to share many of the same values and beliefs as our parents, but it is also our right and our responsibility to decide which ones we agree with and deem helpful in our lives and which ones hold us back and keep us from being who we are.
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As individuals, we each have unique talents, dreams, and abilities. In order to succeed in the world, we must build our confidence around the knowledge that these special things make up our natural selves and make us different from everyone else. This is the concept of “specialness,” the feeling that no matter who else is out there doing the same thing that you’re doing, what you are doing is absolutely unique, and your dreams are not only valid but also precious. I believe that this feeling of specialness is most cultivated during childhood, when we live largely in the world of make-believe. When we are kids, it doesn’t matter to us that slaying dragons, pretending to fly, or building sand castles is not a good career path. The point of playing is to exist in an expectation-free environment in which to develop our passions and interests. I’m not saying that if we played secret agents as kids we will later grow up to be CIA employees. When we play, create, and imagine as kids, we harness a very real, pure kind of magic that we need in our adult lives to recognize our passions, access our creativity, and become inspired.
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I feel like once we reach adolescence, growing up involves surviving the minefield of adult questions…do you have a boyfriend/girlfriend yet? How are your grades? What did you get on the SAT’s? Where are you applying for college? By the time I was 17, I felt like I had to arrive at every adult get-together with a post-it on my forehead with my test scores, grades, relationship status, and where I was applying to school. I’m not a teenager anymore, but I am currently confronting one of biggest questions of early adulthood: what are you doing now that you’ve graduated college?
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