And I’m not counting things like what you do or get when you grow up like having a bank account or getting a real job. Nor am I accepting the whole ‘I just grew up’.
My sign of my childhood ending or accepting that it has ended is when all of the nu-metal bands I was introduced to and listened to a lot of us just ended up fractured. They all didn’t endure the passage of time and it was really just a matter of you had to be there to know how popular they were or the scene was.
The bands I used to have listened to have gone the way of Classic Rock on the radio. Spammed tracks from some bands because that’s all the DJ knows or that’s all they’re allowed to play.
Nothing ages you like talking to an actual young person.
I worked with a software engineer several years ago that was about a decade younger than me. A few of us were talking about first games, and he mentioned playing his dad’s PlayStation and his first game being on the PS2. Our first games were all Master System, NES, all 2D. He said, and I quote, “I wasn’t born when graphics were shit”.
Oof
When you turn 18 and suddenly the government starts sending you paperwork to fill out.
I don’t know, but it might be the time when I ran out of ideas of what to get for christmas. As a kid I always wanted something like cars, lego, sport stuff, bike, whatever came to my mind. I rarely got those things, but my mind was always in “I want that” mode. But growing up I realized I don’t need most those things and also that my parents tried hard to get me at least something so I just “gave up” and asked for actually useful stuff (clothing, socks, etc).
Adding to that, I actually started appreciating a pair of good quality socks.
For me, it was being able to recognize that my parents were well-meaning but imperfect people and not getting angry about it. There was the normal childhood period when I looked up to them and just assumed they could do no wrong, then the reactionary teenage anger phase of, “Fuck you, old man! You don’t know me!”
It wasn’t until around 26 or so that I had calmed down enough to say/feel without malice , “I am going to live my life the way I want to live my life, you may not understand or agree with some of my decisions, and that’s OK. I’m not required to justify or explain them to you.”
A teenage girl in distress came to me and my friend for help and protection even though we were total strangers. We found her other friends and got them all home safe and sound.
I guess knowing that other people see you as a responsible adult, helps you feel like one as well.
Christmas becomes a deadline.
I feel this every year man
When you give yourself a bed time
At one point when I was in my mid to late-twenties, my workplace’s neighbor had their sprinkler system fail and flood their business. It was so bad that a bunch of water seeped under the adjoining wall and we had about a half an inch of water across a third of our fairly large store. There were maybe a dozen or so of us working there at the time, and we all got called in to rapidly move merchandise out into a big truck so that it wouldn’t get spoiled by the damp air before the remediation guys could do their thing.
So there’s all of these people, most of them younger than me, but not by a lot, running back and forth with crates of merchandise, and I looked around and immediately saw how chaotic and inefficient it was.
So I said, “Okay, you stand by the truck. You stand by the front door, you stand just inside. You stand a little further in than that. The first person just picks up a crate, and we bucket brigade it all out to the truck.”
It was an obvious solution, and it made the work go by so much faster and easier, but apparently I was the only one who thought to do it. I realized that in that moment, in a moderately large group, I was the most responsible adult in the room.
And I’m pretty sure that was when my childhood ended.
I grew up in the 80s and 90s and was a “Latchkey Kid” so sometimes I feel like my childhood first got the breaks applied when I started having to carry a set of house keys with me all the time.
My childhood never really began. I was a toddler, then i was a mini adult, having to “watch your brother!¡!¡!” everytime my parents wanted to have fun.
I was one of those kids that adults said was “mature for your age”. Except, it wasn’t maturity, it was fear of my parents.
So for me, childhood ended the first time my parents told me to become a third parent for their child.
Yes I’m still bitter about it, so i won’t call out the down votes on this one
Parentificantion is fun…
For me it was after my baby penis fell off and my adult one finished growing in.
… Does that happen? Like, parts of it fall off?
yesh
Like, is it shedding? I’m not going to believe the whole thing just falls off.
Just in case you’re being serious, I’ll be the responsible adult and say that penises are just like most other body parts and simply grow with the rest of the body until adulthood.
Thank you. I don’t have one, so I wasn’t sure if it like… Shed or something? I don’t know, I don’t know what’s going on down there, but you guys are doing great.
Re: shedding, that’s a problem for some people later in life. Most people need to trim back the foreskin on a regular basis, but for some, it just sloughs right off like your toenails.
Well I’ll be. Ya’ll always have surprises down there. Thank you for the info. 👍🏾
That’s why it’s important to wear briefs as a child - one day, it just falls right off, and you wanna catch it. You don’t want that little fucker rolling out the bottom of your pants leg in the middle of church.
The kid that wants to hold his mom’s hand and to have his dad tell him he’s proud of him will always be in there somewhere. The kid who’s scared of the basement with the lights off. The kid who just wants to play GoldenEye with his brother. He never went anywhere. He’s still in there and comes out when my kids need him.
A powerful statement in therapy that still hits me when I think about it. “You don’t stop being someone’s child.” (I’ll leave it without context, the context would be too painful and personal, so read that however you want.)
Damn that’s a strong text. Thank you for that. That really moved me
My childhood ended when I could finally understand the Hobbes’ quote “Homo homini lupus est”, when I could finally understand the existence of these shadows inside humans (including myself), when I could finally see those shadows right away. My childhood ended when I realized what humanity and society are, when I realized how simpler would it be if humans had stuck being hominins. My childhood ended when this thing, called “sentience”, powered itself on inside my brain, condemning me to understand things that I wished I couldn’t understand. My childhood ended, the kid inside myself is long dead, and now I’m a zombie, a Mortuus-vivens.
When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up. -C.S Lewis
following this i would say when you stop wanting to be grown-up. and that certainly tracks for me
I’m not sure when my childhood ended but I’d say my adulthood began the day I bought my first lawn mower
