The Gilmore Book Club

 The Importance of Growing Up Slowly

When I was young, all I wanted to do was grow up.  I wanted to be free of studying subjects I’d never use in life. I wanted to travel the world, get a job, wear heels to work, and decide what I wanted to eat for dinner. And now that I’m pretty firmly in the adult category, there’s a part of me that wants to grow back down again. I’d love to avoid the frustrations and headaches of medical insurance, the constant presence of bills to be paid and a list of things that need to be replaced, the awareness of just how much injustice and heartbreak defines our world.

The number of years I’ve spent on this earth is enough to give me adult status, but there are days when I wake up, and for a brief moment before I open my eyes, I’m back in middle school again. And some days, I have to strain to remember what it was actually like to be in middle school. How is it that you can feel like a child when you’re an adult and feel like an adult when you’re still a kid. At what point do you make the full transition from one to the other?

 If you’re looking at it in the legal sense, in the US, you’re mostly an adult at 18 and a full adult at 21. If you're a wizard, you come of age at 17. Hobbits, however, are a completely different story; they have to wait until the age of 33.

But the world isn’t cut and dry like that; there are plenty of adults walking around our world with the mental and emotional attitude of a child.  There is a myriad of explanations for this, some of which I’m just beginning to learn by learning more about psychology: early childhood traumas, parental teachings or lack thereof, and an absence of formative and character-defining experiences.

 But what about the children who have these formative and character-defining experiences way too early? Some children encounter obstacles and devastations way beyond their years and are forced to adapt to the rigors of adult life, and their ability to master and adapt influences the rest of their lives.

I was one of those kids. From an early age, it was evident that I was mature for my age. My teachers were surprised to learn that I understood their jokes and comments that were normally way above the other students’ heads. I had difficulty understanding the necessity of the gender-related games and restrictions of the other kids. (Why couldn’t I just be friends with a guy? And why did I have to pretend to run away from a boy so he’d pay attention to me?) But luckily for me, my most harrowing journey of growth did not upend my world until I was 13.

For Scout and Jem Finch, the central figures of To Kill A Mockingbird, the universe did not wait so long

Jem and Scout, son and daughter of Maycomb, Alabama lawyer Atticus Finch, are very much like other children, to begin with anyway. They like to run and play outside, have vivid and expansive imaginations, and are prone to a few sibling squabbles now and then. But they encounter people and occurrences that force them into thinking about people other than themselves, considering other people’s personal histories, thoughts, and feelings, and learning the intricacies, frustrations, and explanations of the world around them. In other words, they start to grow up.

I remember reading To Kill A Mockingbird in school, somewhere around eighth or ninth grade. As far as school books went, I recall liking this book and connecting with the strong emphasis Atticus places on reading. I was a dedicated and smart student, so I’m sure I aced whatever test or paper we had to do for the book, but at that point, I had no idea that far many more important, difficult, and painful tests lay before me, for which I could never be able to prepare. Perhaps this book came into my life as an omen, as a subtle roadmap or handbook for life's tests that catapult you into growing up.

To Kill A Mockingbird is a classic coming-of-age story, a category of literature that we were taught to identify in school, and is one of the first examples of this classification that I remember reading. I’m sure you could easily google a definition for coming-of-age stories, but here’s what it means for me. Coming-of-age, or growing up, is a point or experience at which you achieve a greater understanding of the world and the psychology of humans. There is often a realization of injustice or unfairness, a shattering of innocence, and a recognition of a world that is often infuriatingly beyond your control.

The usual coming of age is a gradual process, starting with experiences as small as a tiny 1x1 Lego brick, the kind easily indiscernible amongst all the other things life has piled onto your plate, building up to the large 50x50 baseplates, the largest Lego brick/piece available, all stacked on top of each other in special formations and patterns to build an adult.

But what happens when the building blocks are all heaped on at once without a proper foundation? What happens when life forces you to grow up too fast and skip steps in the process of maturing? How does beginning to build and then stopping construction altogether affect your life? Is it possible to go back and reassemble what was hastily built before?

Jem, Scout, Atticus, and Boo may not have played with Legos as I did when I was a kid, but something tells me, they know a great deal about what happens when the growing up process is drastically altered.

Continue to Part 2

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