Maturity

I find myself in the conversation of maturity quite a bit,

Seeing jaws drop and eyes widen when I voice my age of nineteen.  

Being told you’re mature for your age isn’t always a good thing.

Maturity is built around trauma,

Maturity is built when you’re forced to grow up too soon, 

Maturity is built when your child-like soul is stripped from your body while your mother still picks out your clothes and you can’t walk to or from the bus stop alone and are tucked into bed every night at eight. 

A child who was so innocent clean and pure,

A child with such a glowing aura she was never seen without a smile on her face showing her missing teeth as she waits for the tooth fairy to slip a five dollar bill under her pillow while she sleeps and dreams of becoming an astronaut one day because…

astronauts can reach the stars. 

Being mature for your age is not something you could have prevented.

Being mature is taking care of yourself before you take care of others.

Being mature is taking those first two steps out of bed in the morning when you would and could simply just turn over and go back to sleep. 

Being mature is forcing yourself to spend time outside in the fresh air and sun because your therapist tells you that you are severely lacking in the realm of vitamin D and that’s why your depression is taking such a severe dip outside of your normal seasonal depression cycle.  

Maturing early is a hand reaching out to you, as a child of course you grab the hand because curiously why wouldn’t you? 

You are now being pulled a thousand miles a minute as you try to plant your feet to the ground but they are suspended behind you as if you’re flying. 

Looking all around you, a black tunnel with flashing memories of you and your life from the second you were born up till now. 

And in this moment, 

you are grown. 

Whether you wanted to or not, whether you knew it was coming or you were blindsided. 

There was never a warning nor a choice. 

There are moments in life that we will cherish forever, 

moments where you feel something inside you slowly start to heal as if there are soul ties pulling you back together. 

We refer to these moments as ‘healing our inner-child’ 

and in these moments we feel ourselves as if we are back to our early years as a child, 

before our sparkle had slowly started to fade. 

It seems as if the whole world has stopped, a smile is painted across your face because that glowing child aura has come back to say hi. 

And in this moment, 

we feel whole again.