Nobody prepared me.
There was no whisper in the quiet spaces of childhood to say,
“Later, it will get heavy.”
What they said was,
“You can be anything.”
They did not mention that anything often means everything:
brave and tired, competent and crumbling,
lonely and full of laughter that no one hears.

They did not say that adulthood is a quiet religion…
its prayers written in bullet points,
its sacred spaces the blue light of a laptop screen at midnight.
That your body would learn the language of exhaustion,
and your spirit would barter peace for productivity.

They did not say that loving yourself would feel like learning to speak again,
that it would take years to call your reflection friend.
That forgiveness is not a grand moment but a daily ritual,
performed in silence,
with no applause.

No one said that life would feel like a staircase with no landing,
that just when you thought you had mastered the climb,
the steps would shift beneath you.
Begin again. Again. Again.

And love…
they made it sound simple.
Movies, songs, fairy tales.
But real love?
It’s a group project you can’t finish alone.
It’s beautiful, exhausting, a mirror and a hammer at once.
It asks you to show up.
Even when you’re tired.
Especially when you’re tired.

But still,
we are here.
Clinging to routines that never loved us back,
pretending that being functional
means we are fine.

Growing up is cruel
It takes without asking…
your softness, your time, your mother’s hands,
the version of you who believed in forever.

It teaches you how to smile with your teeth and not your eyes,
how to say “I’m okay”
with a grief sitting heavy in your throat.

So who sent us to grow up?
No one.
That is the cruelty of it
we arrived here by living.

And still, somehow,
we stay.
We ache.
We begin again.

 

 

 

 

 

Photo by Mo Darbz on Unsplash