Growing up, part 1

~ i.e. more than intellect and physical independence; an epitaph for a former classmate ~

I've been thinking lately about what it means to grow up. It seems an ultra-important issue, given that what I used to believe "growing up" meant five years ago was vastly different from what I believe it to be now. Sure, there are the barebones requirements: having a job, having a place of my own, and at the very least being able to financially support myself without needing help from my family of origin (i.e. my parents). There are a few others, like getting married, perhaps owning a house and car… although this is starting to sound more like the American dream than anything else. And I am going to say this outright: accomplishing the "American dream" is not the same as growing up.

But everywhere I look, people of my generation (Generation Y), although independent in at least a few of the ways I described above, aren't as "grown up" as I thought. We still depend on our parents emotionally (and often financially) as if we were children. It seems that whenever we invest in something, whether a house or a marriage or a career, when something goes wrong it's as if it were the end of the world and we need to be consoled. (Unfortunately we often go to the wrong places for it.)

My sense is my generation doesn't have a sense of autonomy like our parents and grandparents did. Granted, in those earlier days it was: "when you're 18, you're out the door" and "figure it out on your own." Our parents and grandparents made mistakes and learned from them. It seems as if we're afraid to make mistakes, or maybe it's more because we're too emotionally underdeveloped to learn from them when we do. (Or maybe we always were.)

Point is, with both parents out of the house working, someone or something less qualified is often entrusted to our care. Because of the lack of nurture our parents gave us, we turn to other things to feed our very souls, often things that teach us lies about the world, about ourselves, about each other, and about life. And my generation's "adulthood" is the fruit of what our parents sowed, for better or for worse.

A common lie we've believed is not persevering. When something goes wrong, I think the best thing to do is to run away to avoid life's problems, conveniently forgetting that life's problems stay with me wherever I go. That's not something I learned in school; what I learned in school was how to analyze numbers and literature and music, how languages worked, and how chemicals behave when they're put together. That's great, I learned something useful, but it really was just a diversion from the dung that was my childhood.

The best thing that ever happened to me was finishing school. Because of all the crap I lived through in the early years of my life, my defense was to block it out and focus on school, focus on grades and pretend like nothing else mattered. It didn't work anyway. I didn't really grow up all those years I was in school, because of it.

Aaron Swartz ["http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/13/technology/aaron-swartz-internet-activist-dies-at-26.html"] was in my geometry class freshman year at North Shore Country Day School. Dude was brilliant. He was already a year younger than the rest of us, and he was already in geometry (all freshmen were either in algebra or geometry for math that year). At the end of the year he left North Shore to go somewhere else, and I never saw him again. Only sometime late in college I heard from him again, when I -- not sure how I did this -- signed up on to an email listing whose focus was to spread the importance of internet freedom.

I'm not going to go into any more of his bio. Swartz was brilliant. It's worth repeating that, because I saw it first-hand. I don't know if I was ever at all jealous of him, particularly given that I was a year-and-a-half older than he, and that he was my year in school and doing better in some areas than even I was. I don't think I was jealous, but I won't blame myself if I were. Point is, he's now dead, having committed suicide. Articles say he struggled with depression for years. To be fair, he was looking at significant jail time for pirating data from J-stor, but in my opinion it doesn't matter.

Swartz may have been brilliant and independent and, legal issues aside, had a good chunk of what he wanted in life. But, all his intellect aside, he lacked in emotional and spiritual maturity. We don't struggle with depression for something stupid like "chemical imbalance." Something(s) happened in Swartz' life that stunted his emotional growth, and to throw in a few triggers, a few lies, I'm not at all surprised that he would struggle with the such. Being insanely smart has no defense against it.

Swartz never had the chance to really grow up. To me, that's the biggest loss in yesterday's tragedy. And I look across everyone I've ever known, I'm very doubtful that even a handful of people my age have really grown up (a once-good friend of mine from the past who married his wife at 23 confided to me recently that they were in counseling, something that caught me off-guard at first but is making more sense now). I just realize how very blessed I am to have a safe place where I can heal and take care of myself.

So then, what is growing up? Taking care of myself (financially, emotionally, etc), for one, but I will also add allowing myself to trust in God and trust in others, in community, to be there with me in times both good and bad. Growing up means being able to handle the ups and downs with budgeting and finances, relationships, parenting (if applicable), and knowing when to risk and when to lay back. This list is by no means exhaustive, but it's what I've been able to figure out thus far.