Growing Pains

To launch the blog, I chose to start with this topic. So, to give a little pretext my birthday is coming up in less than two weeks and looking back at my short life thus far I’m mesmerized to say the least by the journey I have taken so far. It has been fun, glorious and adventurous but it has also been a painful one. All along I thought growing up was supposed to be fun.

Oh boy, how I have always wanted to be an adult. I don’t know if we share the same sentiments but being young was the stick that my older siblings used to beat me with as we were growing up together. The long curfews, the movies they had the privileges to watch, the places they used to go and how I always wanted to be a part of it was always followed by their blunt and painful rhetoric – “…you’re still a kid, you’ll understand when you’re older!”.

Well, I know I was a stubborn kid and a nuisance at times but show me one child who can counter that one liner. It was because of rebuttals like that which made me yearn to be an adult, dream of the fancy life and get high on fantasies of how everything would be sweet and smooth when I would be an adult. Well at 21 I am not yet fully grown, but I already know the ending of this one – pain. It is not fun being an adult.

When we are still young, we are shielded from the harsh realities of the world, the foul that scurries on the face of the earth and the evil nature of mankind. As we grow older, we slowly start to learn for ourselves as we are introduced to a world of pain, heartbreak, envy and deceit. I always ask myself of the day when I realized that I had grown up and for me it was the day I realized that my parents were not the perfect human beings I thought them to be. The day you grow up as an individual is when you can see fault in those who you hold dear (parents and loved ones) and how they try to cover it up for you so that you have a positive outlook on your life. That wave of overwhelming pain and guilt that overshadows us when we feel bad upon discovering a parent’s struggle for the comfort of their child and then realizing that very soon that mantle is going to be ours soon as we take that next stage in our lives. Those to me are the growing pains.

Those growing pains are the same ones I am preparing myself to tackle head on as I launch this blog into the world, public for any willing participant to take in my thoughts, views and opinions. You are with me on this journey as I am but just a novice, a child in this brutal world of blogging. If you had no clue – a creative person’s worst nightmare is being at the mercy of critics. Those are the kind of pains I have to go through if I am to establish myself as one of the best writers in the blogsphere. The proverbial sheep leading itself to the slander of detractors and jeers of the masses – the internet can be a cruel place. These are the growing pains I am preparing myself as I am just an infant, I have to learn my craft the hard way, by showing my skills to the world, taking every single word of praise lightly and taking any criticism on the chin like the man I am preparing myself to be.

For so long I have been keeping myself from writing, afraid of the growing pains I would have to endure and babying myself in my comfort zone. To any one of you out there who is procrastinating on doing what they have to do, take this as your mystical sign from the universe and start now. We are only as good as our last success and I hate to break it to you, but that ship has sailed, we have to go again, we have to grow and go through the pain.

This is my journey to self-discovery and I am glad that you have chosen to be a part of this journey. You, the one who is reading this blog post is taking the first step with me as I endure my Growing Pains.