Growing up is hard.
Whenever I think about what life has been like growing up, Wild World by Cat Stevens is the song that always finds its way back to me. I used to listen to it endlessly throughout my adolescent years, long before I understood why it made my chest ache. Looking back now, I think I was mourning something I couldn’t yet put into words.
The older I get, the more I realise I never loved that song because it was about someone leaving.
I loved it because I wished someone had loved me enough to say those words to me.
To tell me that it was a wild world. To tell me it would be hard to get by just upon a smile. To remind me to take care of myself because there would be people who wouldn’t. To look at me the way the song does, as someone still so young, still worth protecting.
Instead, I learnt all of those things on my own.
Growing up is hard because no one prepares you for the day your heart breaks at the hands of the people you loved most unconditionally. As children, we believe there will always be someone standing between us and the world. Someone who will make sure we get home safely, who will notice when we’re hurting, who will protect us simply because that’s what love does.
I always believed there would be at least one person who would keep my heart safe.
Life had other plans.
Every man I have ever loved has broken my heart in one way or another. But the heartbreak that stayed with me wasn’t the kind that arrived through romance. It came much earlier than that. It came from realising that the people I believed would always protect me were just people too. Fallible. Distracted. Human. And sometimes, painfully absent when I needed them most.
I think that’s why Wild World still makes me cry.
Because somewhere inside me there is still a little girl who wanted someone to see the world before she did. Someone to tell her to be careful. Someone to remind her that smiling wouldn’t always be enough. Someone to remember that she was, above everything else, just a child.
We spend so much of our lives believing we’re meant to outgrow that child. I don’t think we ever do. I think we simply learn to become the person we needed back then.
And maybe that’s all growing up really is.
She Was Sea 