Too old for growing pains

April 12, 2011 4:57 PM

Resources for growing up?

I'm 21, and for a little while, have been very teary-eyed over some changes in my life. My childhood home is being sold and I actually began sobbing when I saw the listing online and over the thought of it no longer being my home. I feel like I'm grieving my childhood and my childhood friends and what life used to feel like when I was 13, 14, 15. I feel pretty ridiculous feeling this way, but I also feel pretty scared and sick to my stomach over all of these changes.

I feel like the past decade has just hit me in the face and I'm suddenly much older than I thought I was.

Does anyone have any good resources that may help me to cope with this sort of thing? Books (fiction or self-help), movies, articles, and anecdotes are welcome.

Thank you.

posted by DeltaForce to human relations (15 answers total)

It's okay to cry. Feeling these feelings are essential for growth. One thing that has helped me tremendously, actually it might be one of the most important things, is recognizing that some things are beyond my control. I was raised with this mentality and it has served me well.

Another thing to take note of is gratitude. Gratitude that you have lovely memories of a happy childhood home and friends. A lot of people don't have this. You are a lucky person.

Make new friends, but keep the old. One is silver, and the other gold.
posted by Fairchild at 5:11 PM on April 12, 2011 [1 favorite]

You're seeking resources as if avoiding these pains will help you be an adult--but it's the tears that make you an adult. Crying your way to being an adult is 100% OK. Spoiler: there's a lot of loss as an adult--but what makes growing up kind of awesome is when you get to the point when you can say, yes, there is loss, but there is also gain. Sadness and joy. And the only way you really get there (in my mind) is when you walk those twisty roads, shed some tears, and then ultimately summit and look back on all the distance you travelled.

Good luck. Sounds like you're on the right path.
posted by Admiral Haddock at 5:19 PM on April 12, 2011 [15 favorites]

I'm also 21, so I don't have anything wise to say, but you certainly have my empathy.

I don't know if this falls under the "help you cope" category, but Andrea is Changing Her Name by Keven Brockmeier made me feel all kinds of weepy and nostalgic and not-alone. You may or may not be able to read it here. If not, it's a short story in Brockmeier's collection A View From the Seventh Layer.
posted by i_am_a_fiesta at 5:19 PM on April 12, 2011 [2 favorites]

You're a day younger now than you will be tomorrow. A lot of people in the world would give everything to be 21 again. Be grateful for what you had but make the most of your life now because time only goes faster and soon you'll be 30 and getting all teary about the time you were 21 and had the world at your feet and did nothing.
posted by joannemullen at 5:22 PM on April 12, 2011 [5 favorites]

Growing up is like that, and it takes forever. Actually, it never really ends.

For movies and TV shows and the like, try the TV Tropes Growing Up Sucks and End of an Age.

You may also find music (Into the West, Graduation, Good Riddance, etc.) to be therapeutic.
posted by SMPA at 5:28 PM on April 12, 2011

My mother sold my childhood home when I was 21, right after my grandfather died. I've lived in four places in the six years since. I've often felt quite homeless.

A few months ago, I'd had a little too much to drink, and was sitting on my bedroom floor talking to my husband. I looked at the way the light was on the wall beneath the curtain. I'd seen that light before--that kind of yellowish white, creamy light, when the night outside was dark? I saw the cracks in the walls and the weave of the carpet and the shadows of my blankets on the bed.

There was a time when I thought the things I knew and loved about my house were about the house. But then I realized something: it's not about the house. It's about you, and your perceptions of the world. Like a turtle, you carry those things with you. That is what home is, not a place. It's the way the air smells on a rainy Sunday morning, the conversations you have with your mother after dinner. Those things never came from a place. They came from inside of you, and no one, and nothing, can ever take them away from you.
posted by PhoBWanKenobi at 5:36 PM on April 12, 2011 [21 favorites]

Oh, and whatever you do, do not watch the entire series of the Wonder Years over the course of a month. Seriously. It Does Not Help.
posted by PhoBWanKenobi at 5:40 PM on April 12, 2011 [2 favorites]

I dread the day my parents sell their house (my childhood home). They've already bought the apartment they'll retire into so it's a certainty. I know I'll cry and I'm 36.

It's about you, and your perceptions of the world. Like a turtle, you carry those things with you. That is what home is, not a place.

Exactly this. My grandmother's home -- one that holds lots of beautiful childhood memories -- was demolished more than a decade ago, yet if I drive by that address, I don't actually see the house that replaced it, I see my Nana's house. I see the disgusting shag pile carpet we used to sit on to watch Doctor Who on Tuesday nights with my cousins and my Nana's ugly brown chair where she sat and expertly peeled herself an apple or pear over a plastic bowl.

I'm just repeating what others have said but suppressing those emotions doesn't make you an adult. Human beings -- adult and otherwise -- feel these things.
posted by prettypretty at 5:44 PM on April 12, 2011

I'm 21 too, and it's almost a joke among my friends that every conversation we have turns into "Ahhh we're so old!! What happened? Who let this happen?" Obviously, we know we aren't really old at all, but it feels good to wallow in those feelings with people who won't remind you that you're actually just a baby-adult. Talking about it and realizing that you're totally normal helps so much.
posted by MadamM at 5:51 PM on April 12, 2011

When I was a child, my grandparents had this beautiful house full of history and places to hide and books to explore, and it was really rough on me when they sold it when I was about 14 (conveniently around the same time my parents divorced and I started high school). One thing that really helped was writing down everything I loved about it in intimate detail, sort of just to reassure myself that I wouldn't forget anything. It made me feel much more at peace at the time, and over ten years later, I could still walk through that house with my eyes closed.
posted by oinopaponton at 6:01 PM on April 12, 2011

After my grandmother died, I went through her house and photographed every room, soup to nuts, before we started clearing it out. She still had pantyhose hanging to dry over the bathtub, and food in the fridge. I took photos of the closet I used to hide in as a kid, her china closet and even the foam heads she used as wig stands and that I had scrawled faces on decades before.

It took three years until I could look at the photos. But when I looked at them, they were magic. She's been gone for over eight years, and those photos are STILL magic to me.

Take photos of your home, give yourself time to grieve. You'll be okay.
posted by ladygypsy at 6:45 PM on April 12, 2011 [5 favorites]

Weird suggestion: Richard Ford's The Sportswriter. It's about a middle aged man dealing with death and divorce, but I read it around your age and remember feeling comforted by the wisdom--and by how far away all that seemed.

Also talk with older friends (not just here). If you don't have any, go out and make some.
posted by vecchio at 7:23 PM on April 12, 2011

When I was a kid, there was a row of four trees in the downhill corner of the yard: two big cedars (which used to always catch our frisbees), a big old white pine (which dripped sap and left hard green cones in the grass), and a little dogwood tree, just the right size for climbing. The dogwood was my favorite. I loved sitting in it. I loved the blossoms. I loved that it was small. Even after all my siblings were too big to climb it, I could still sit in it and pretend I was an explorer, a spy, a hunter. It was my tree, and I loved it with all my heart.

The white pine was cut down when I was in high school. The cedars both had to come down in my first year of college. The dogwood got termites, lost a limb in a storm, and finally was taken down last year. We burned it up in the fireplace last winter; the last of it went up the chimney over spring break. At first it was surprisingly hard to be laying a fire in the fireplace and to actually recognize the knots in the logs, and to have memories associated with them, vivid memories, from fifteen years or more ago. But the tree was old. It's time had come and gone, and now at least we were putting it to good use, instead of just letting it rot by the back fence.

You're childhood home is like the dogwood: its time has come. Not in the sense that it's dying, but in that it has outlived its usefulness to your family. If you're in college, it's not even really your home anymore; you live at school during the academic year at least, possibly more, and pretty soon you'll be moving off somewhere else entirely, to get a job and have adventures and start a life on your own. That's the thing with childhood homes: once the children grow up and leave, it may not be very useful to the people (your parents) who get left behind. Why should they spend all that money and time and energy living in a house they don't really want and which doesn't really want them? No, it's better to sell it to someone who really wants it, someone who can put it to good use and love it for what it is, and make their own memories of the place.
posted by Commander Rachek at 8:02 PM on April 12, 2011 [2 favorites]

I know that home is mostly something that you carry in your head, and sometimes I come at problems sideways or backwards, but the way I've combated the homeless feeling is to carry a small amount of consistent stuff with me no matter where I move.

Some of it is from my old house: a blanket that I have loved since I was little, my collection of small gods, some books. Some of it is from my mom, who gave it to me right after college: a tea kettle that rattles like a rocket ship, a bright red mug, a good saucepan, a set of spoons. And some of it I have accumulated since then: a few Japanese prints, the perfect kitchen chair, another blanket, more books, a Navajo rug.

I have moved 4 times in the last 6.5 years. I've stuffed that kitchen chair into the back of my car at least twice to drive across the country. And that might seem sort of silly, but it means that at this point, I can make any new apartment feel almost automatically like home just by setting up all that stuff.

I guess what I'm really saying is that you can create your own consistency: you can carry it with you. And I think consistency is one of the things that makes a home feel like home, and can help you not feel so rootless.
posted by colfax at 1:20 AM on April 13, 2011 [1 favorite]

One of the marks of growing up is moving from simply feeling to taking action. The feelings you have are natural and a positive indicator that you are self-aware.

The loss of the childhood home is A Big Deal. It's a severing of the rootedness to a place and a realisation as to the impermanence of something that perhaps seemed so permanent. There is a stage of feeling in which there is grief and loss. The adolescent expresses grief or loss. The adult will take some action to bring closure to those emotions and put them in a coherent context.

When my own childhood house was sold, I took photographs of the minutiae you would see when arriving there. A lock on a gate. A planter. The oven hardware (it was an antique oven). The texture of the carpet in the sunlight. I mounted these prints in two three-print frames. I made two sets of these frames and gave one to my parents and kept one for myself. I know have a memory of the details of that place that is tangible.

Point is, you can utilise these feelings to bring about answers and closure for yourself. You need to honour your emotions without being ruled by them.

Photography is my own form. I took a picture of all our pets in the prime of their lives and made prints and put them away. After the animal's passing, I mounted and framed the prints as a personal eulogy.

Some people write stories, some people read those stories aloud. Some people go running or do a marathon. Some people go on an adventure.

Each person has a coping mechanism that is used to process these events and place them in time. Even joyous events (graduation) have a bittersweet element, hence why there are huge celebrations around them. To provide a positive anchor to a conflicting moment.

Further, this story provides a bit of context on how to place significant life events.
posted by nickrussell at 1:32 AM on April 13, 2011 [1 favorite]