Most of us never grow up. We live as adult babies throughout our twenties and maybe late into our 30’s. I know I’ve experienced this because I was one of those adult babies for some time. Not too long because I recognised it early on, but still.
We don’t grow up because our parents baby us. They baby us from childhood into adulthood, and on. They never let go of this behaviour and then it can only but cause us harm. When you’re a child your parents want to protect you and give you all they can, so they do. From food, to some pocket money, to figuring out which school you will attend and whose house you will sleep over. And then into your teens, when they decide when you have to be back home, what you will be eating for lunch, and when you can spend time with your friends.
But in our teen years something happens to us. We become tired of our parents protective behaviours and we try to break free. Usually our attempts fail and we return right back into the arms of our parents. We might try a few times, and maybe then our parents began to realise that it’s time for little Timmy to grow up, or… they just get frustrated and enforce harsher provisions over Timmy.
Now we’re adults, we just turned twenty, but we don’t really know how to integrate ourselves into reality, so we lean on our parents to give us emotional and financial support. And this might go on for years. Eventually something happens, maybe a family argument which leads into major frustration and we no longer can live within the constraints of the family. So we try on our own, into the mad world of individualism and harsh faces and we realise it’s harder than we thought. We might have a break down, reality has crushed our souls and what do we do? We go back to seeking dependence from our parents or maybe our peers.
The issue here is that we never really learned how to integrate into society. Our parents always did everything for us, and we never had an opportunity to interact with reality through our own senses. Our twenties is the time to be freed from the grips of our parents and do “stuff” on our own, ‘without’ the supervision of our parents. Your twenties is when you have the freedom and the opportunity to try and fail, but failure is not a consequence, rather a teacher. Our parents are the teachers of our youth, but failure is the teacher of adulthood. We must try, fail and learn. It’s is the only way to develop dependancy for ourselves and onto ourselves.
If you don’t, it will hurt you, it will hurt your development as a healthy adult. You will wonder around throughout the years, trying to figure out what it means to live in society and how to do so. The earlier you break out the better, because it takes quite a while to understand reality for what truly is. You need to make your own money, you need to be able to support yourself in times of obscurity, you need not to lean on others for it.
And maybe you’ve done it. Broken away from the chains of your parents. That still doesn’t mean that you are free. Our habitual behaviours are like flys, they follow us around buzzing from one ear into the other, and we let them. Many of us, even myself - have a very hard time letting go, and so we look around us and lean on others, could be our friends, our grandparents, our lovers. And if we’re unconscious about this, the parent child situation will just repeat. You will find someone else to lean on, someone else to give you the financial and emotion support you’re seeking, and will avoid developing it from the inside out.
The best way to integrate into society - if you’ve suffered from this - is to do it one step at a time, and to do this progressively. Instead of letting others do things for you, begin to do them yourself - whether it’s cooking for yourself, doing your own laundry, filling your own paperwork, setting up a bank account, you must be responsible for this, not your parent or your peer.
You don’t have to let go all at once, test the water one toe at a time. If your mother has been cooking for you on a daily basis, tell her you will cook lunch for yourself. If she does your laundry, tell her you will do it from now on. If she is giving you an allowance, tell her you will put in some hours to compensate for the allowance you receive and eventual get a job.
When it comes to emotional support, sit with yourself in times of trouble, question why you feel this way, and do practical things that make you feel a bit better. Exercise, meet friends, get involved in your community and activities you enjoy, (in time of emotionally instability we tend to turn to addictions when our parents are absent, so we might do drugs, watch porn, or eat a lot, so make sure you are conscious of this and don’t let yourself sink into your addictions).
As a young adult this realisation needs to hit you, and you need to let it hit you, because if you just ignore it and go on living your life depending on others you will never be able to depend on yourself. I’ve experience this myself. My mom would take care of me, she would do my paperwork, she would give me a bit of money here and there and, she would set up all my doctor appointments and such.
But as I began to get into my twenties I realised this was so and began to separate from my dependency on her. I moved out, I filled out my own job applications and made my own money, I did my own laundry and cooked my own food. It was a difficult 3 - 6 years, but now as a 24 year old I don’t cry when mommy is not there, or mommy doesn’t send me some money, I stand up and get shit done so that I can survive in this world.
The world is a bitch, that’s the truth. Life is not easy, but if you want to live and experience reality on a higher level, than this is the fundamental action that you must take to liberate your mind and body from the grip of your parents. And then reality can become fun, you can make up your own rules and play within this world. But it’s hard to do so if your parents are always holding you when you go down the slide.