Let me tell you a secret:
No one feels grown up inside, not completely. I mean, maybe the Dalai Lama or Helen Mirren or Barack Obama, maybe, but I bet even those people don’t feel that way all the time.
I didn’t know this when I was younger. I thought there would be a finish line to childhood. A clear demarcation between child and grown up. Like you graduate high school or college, and you are given your grown up card, along with the instruction manual for adult life.
When I was thirty, one of my rotations on internship was Hospital Based Home Care, where I was sent to work with a woman who was eighty-five, in a wheel-chair and depressed. When I asked her why she was feeling low she said she would look in the mirror and be surprised, every time, by the old woman looking back at her. It didn’t feel like her. I asked her how old she felt inside. She said thirty-five. She said she had never felt over thirty-five and it felt disorienting to see herself in the mirror.
I started asking people how old they feel inside. Not many people say anything over forty. I started trying to find people who found ways to live as the age they feel, rather than the age they looked. If you try, you can do it too. Haven’t you met an octogenarian who is more full of life and energy than a twenty-something? The old woman in the park doing tai chi, so at ease with herself and the world, versus the wah wah wah girl at the table next to you at Towne and Country, so tired with her low battery phone and her badly made boba tea.
I think my view of being a grown- up, all serious and responsible, was too limited a view and maybe that was the problem with my eighty-five year old client too. Maybe true growth is to take on the parts of being grown up that matter, keeping promises, fulfilling responsibilities, treating people well, but also keep the parts of youth that make life worth living. Keep the fun, the open mind, the pure enjoyment of simple things like playing, moving your body, laughing with friends.
As I get older, and then even older, I am more drawn to energy over appearance, noticing it, sitting down beside it, relieved adulthood is not really about the age. I’m feeling more able to see the essence of people and when I can’t see it I ask, “How old do you feel inside?”
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