Growing into ourselves
I’m 42 and half years old. Some part of me was convinced that I’d have reached the mythical land of grown up by now. As though I’d hit a final evolution, like a Pokemon or something, and that would be it. Pinnacle state locked in. Unchanging forevermore.
Problem with that delicious little delusion is that life seems to be an ever unfolding process. There is no static end point without, you know, being dead. And even then our experience probably continues to unfold in untold mysterious ways. Well fuck. There goes that I guess.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about growing up and growing into ourselves.
Aging doesn’t necessarily equal growing up. As I traverse the wilds of mid-life, I see so many of us are scrabbling around trying to feel our way into how to be ourselves. How to mature. Not 'to ‘be mature’ like some kid carrying too many responsibilities on narrow shoulders, but to actually step into adulthood. It’s not like we get a roadmap.
For most of us living in Western culture, crossing the threshold of your 18th birthday is what signifies adulthood. Being a legal adult. Being able to drink and vote and marry and join the army. Ta da! You reached the finish line of childhood! You’re an adult now! And of course we also get the cultural milestones of grown uppery – marriage, house ownership, having kids – but none of that requires actual maturation does it? The acts of ‘adulting’ can just as easily keep us chasing that ideal of arrival. The happily ever after always disappearing just over the next milestone.
Very few of us, in this disconnected, ritual-less culture, have guidance on how to actually mature. And so we’re all here, wandering into midlife, trying to grow ourselves up.
And fuck, like, how do we grow up? Without initiations and guidance from elders? What even is it to come into a grown version of ourselves? For me, a big part of it involves taking responsibility. Owning our gifts, embodying our power, choosing to come into a wiser relationship with the world.
There’s also a thread of becoming. That maturing requires us to take up the thing we’re here to do in the world. The thing we hold like a tender secret in our gut. Part of becoming mature centres around letting that quiet drive lead us forward, even when it leads us down paths that might not line up with where we thought we were going.
Growing ourselves up involves reckoning with the survival skills we had to learn as little ones. Discerning what’s still useful. It’s riding out the vulnerability of moving through our lives in a different way so that we can loosen the habitual patterns that once helped us survive but are now holding back from becoming.
When I sit with that, it makes me pretty grateful that there isn’t some final Elle-mon evolution that I’ll stay at forever. Because I’m 42 and a half and I think I’m finally understanding just how malleable life is. How we can change at any time. How we can become over and over, shedding the layers of protection and coming closer and closer to the truth of ourselves.
I think I’m figuring out how to become a creator of reality rather than a passenger. That feels like a step towards grown-ness.
Coming up:
✹ Safer Spaces
Online, April 29th
2 - 5pm UK time
Co-hosted with Sara Duigou
A workshop is for anyone who works with people’s bodies - tattoo artists, coaches, movement teachers, massage therapists, hair dressers, healers – and wants to help their clients feel safe with them.
✹ The Foundation
Online or in person at Studio Dreamland.
Somatic mentorship for artists and creatives. Establish a somatic practice that acts like a steady foundation so that you can reconnect to your most potent, creative self.
Sustenance:
There a whole corner of the internet went utterly wild for Agine de Poitrine this week and I am a proud citizen of that corner
Also ear worming its way right into the centre of my brain has been the sweet queer countryfolk of Olive Klug. Always here for a good banjo moment
Consider me officially chomping at the bit for this Mary Oliver documentary to come out
I give zero fucks about Tik Tok dances and I give all the fucks about this perfect 60’s choreography
Did you know that the magic of the internet enables you to listen to Martin Shaw tell you the tale of The Lindworm? A particularly resonant tale for anyone wayfinding their way through the discomfort of shedding skins
This is Eyes Open, Dreaming – one woman’s adventures in creativity, liberatory somatics, animism, and embodying worlds of connection.
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Love these thoughts on growing up and becoming. I always try to remind myself it’s a spiral rather than a straightforward trajectory