What It Actually Means to Grow Up

If growing up were easy, everyone would do it.

For many years, I was dedicated to growing up. That meant unraveling reactions and patterns that plagued me—especially in relationships. Pulling back. Lashing out. Being passive-aggressive. Feeling weakened and stuck in emotional sludge.

It meant facing parts of myself. Mourning the loss of ideas and dreams my younger self held so closely. It meant a lot of mother-wound work.

What I learned is that there’s a big difference between the idea of growing up and the actual living of it.

With many of my clients, I see this exact threshold being crossed.

You could call it maiden into mother. Boyhood into manhood. Younger self into adult self. The words don’t really matter.It’s a dying and a rebirthing. An unraveling and a remembering. A stepping out of and into….A literal growing bigger in your nervous system. In your capacity as a body.

And this is the part that doesn’t get talked about as much…

We can have a ritual. A big experience. Declare that we’re crossing a threshold. But it’s in the living of it—the doing of the doing, the making moves in real time, in real life—that growing up actually happens.

Otherwise, it’s just an idea.

You grow up in the messy moments. When you move toward a big dream and get let down.When you let go of an old friendship because you want something bolder, braver, more true. When you have the hard conversation—when it’s awkward and uncomfortable—but you do it anyway.

It’s so much harder to take action in real life than to hold the fantasy that now everything will be easy and different because of this new “embodiment.”

That’s not how it works.

It’s in the living of it.

The doing of it.

That’s how you grow up.

It’s far more real and messy than we want it to be. Far more uncomfortable.

And—it is more worth it than we could have ever imagined.