Do Our Childhoods Ever Have To End?

Remember your childhood when you had every summer off, read bible stories before humping pillows at nap time, tricked the neighbor girl into showing you her snatch before she fell off the rope swing and broke her vagina bone, and poured olive oil and shampoo all over the kitchen floor so you could slip and slide? Our childhoods are a time in our lives when everything is simple. Inevitably we are expected to grow up and become adults. But what the hell does that even mean?

Are we expected to stop having fun? Stop seeing the world as a place of adventure? Stop climbing trees, making pillow forts, experimenting sexually and sniffing glue? I am at a time in my life where adulthood is looming on the horizon and I have never wanted to hold onto my childhood more.

Because what does being an adult really mean? To many it means paying your bills, working a 40+ hour week, finding a mate, settling down, buying property, making sure toilet paper is restocked, learning to cook, saving for your future and starting a family.

Is it just me or do all those things fucking suck ass? Sure, there are perks to paying your bills–otherwise how will you use your iphone to get on Grindr? Working a 40+ hour week is ridiculous because we are sold the lie that working that much is the only way we can live–but I have been working 10 hour work weeks for 7 months and I still live in Manhattan and drink every night. If you do find a mate in your twenties, chances are they wont last through your thirties, so you might as well fuck around. Making sure toilet paper is restocked is just too difficult, and starting a family is all well and good–I know plenty of ppl who have done it well at many different ages. I personally want to fully figure out who I am before I even think about teaching someone how to find out who they are.

Everyone is on their own path and has their own goals–the only real problem I have with all this is that becoming an adult seems to come with this idea that you have to take yourself seriously. Living in NY is like living in a bubble where there is no right or wrong–but for the other 15% of the US that doesn’t live here these issues are real.

So I propose that if you find yourself thinking: “My life sucks because I don’t want to be an adult.” that you either take a break from it or postpone it. Do the most irresponsible thing you can do. Call out of work and just get in your car and drive aimlessly. (remember when you were a teenager and you drove just for the sake of driving? Now you zone out on your way to work and often don’t even remember how you got there.) Build a pillow fort. Go to a lake at night, make a water bong using lakewater, and try and figure out how to get home later–but make sure you bring salt and vinegar chips. Sit on your roof for hours and just look at the sky. Get really dramatic over a breakup and cut yourself. Or at the very least, go to the park and swing. Your ass will hurt after but it will be worth it.

We are not the victims of our lives–we are the creators of them. When you were a child you thought objectively–there were millions of possibilities and ways to solve your problems. Now that you are an adult you are brainwashed into believing there is only one way to get where you want to go. But think about it–unless a mid-life crisis+divorce is where you want to go,(which btw only happen when ppl realize how much time they have wasted pretending to be an adult) you are headed in the wrong fucking direction.

The good news is that it is never too late to be a kid again. And even if you no longer see it, the world is still filled with possibilities.

To sniff glue.