The pressure to act maturely nibbles on my mental peace
No, I will not understand and I am not mature. I am also not sorry.
Mature, the supreme, ever prime, all-encompassing personality trait is probably giving you anxiety and you don’t even know it.
Society benefits from restraining individual expression, stenciling reactions, promoting predictability in human behaviour, and demanding that the weight of despicable behaviour be borne by the smarter/more mature people.
Unfortunately, this burden is unfairly borne by people who are on the receiving end of some mistreatment and more often than not it takes away the power to hold people accountable. The fear of being perceived as immature forces people to let go of things that bother them and discount their boundaries.
The primary indicators of maturity today are muted reactions, absence of anger, and an unachievable degree of stoicism. Speaking softly and pretending to be unfettered is exhausting when there is a whirlpool of emotions inside you.
The implicit requirement from an emotionally mature person is that they will make the sacrifice and bite the bullet until this emotional maturity transpires into this numbness and apathy.
Maturity cannot be rushed and young adults struggling with the idea are losing their minds. I know I am.
Maturity just conveys so much at once. Matureness, full growth, experienced, and adulthood, are all some of the ideas encapsulated in maturity.
This experience and fullness of growth cannot be rushed, it only happens in it own time. Experiences are a direct function of time and our openness to them. The expectation of maturity at an early without the requisite experiences is an impossible feat. When we chase maturity without lived experiences, we draw from other people’s behaviors. We imitate. This imitation is inauthentic and distressing because we feel compelled to act like the bigger person even when we are bursting with rage and dissatisfaction. There is nothing more harmful than the bottling up that happens behind the pretence of stoicism, apathy, nonchalance, and balance.
We would perform brilliantly if we inundated ourselves with experiences — good, bad, sad, frustrating so much so that nothing feels new anymore, nothing fazes us out. I want to reach a point in life where I look at things with sweet acceptance and with a rough sketch of how to process them.
Immaturity is only inexperience. We grow, not as years go by but as experiences go by. Failure, success, betrayal, love, heartbreak, loss are events that define growth and if we do not expose ourselves to these, we will forever remain immature inadvertently, projecting this insecurity onto others.
The real problem begins when the pressure to act appropriately causes people to bottle up emotions. Maturity is not a behavioural phenomenon at all. It is, instead, an iterative blueprint of how we collect and process information internally.
The path to maturity is our desire to be whole, and cultivate a meaningful life. The gravity of the experiences becomes more apparent.
It’s in the way that we handle pain. The difference between finding a way to heal and taking it out on others, or holding it in to our own detriment. It’s in our capacity to express empathy, objectivity and accountability. It’s in our willingness to be vulnerable for our progress.
But no one teaches us that. We’re not taught how to grow emotionally. We never learn how to constructively process others not liking or wanting us. Nobody ever talks about how we should move on when we don’t want to. Nobody ever says, “It’s OK. Things pass. The pain is temporary.”
How others respond to our truth is their problem, not ours.
Imagine the heartache and disappointment we would’ve potentially been spared had it been properly weighted among all other forms of maturity to begin with.
I am not asking people to lose the plot and go crazy. All I’m saying is that it would be so much more peaceful if we treated our emotions as guests who leave in due time. They may leave the house a bit messy and yeah, you may have to call the plumber but things get fixed. Where am I going with this analogy? Exactly where this piece is going. Nowhere.
