Growing up, sideways, outward, and inward.

some kinda of adult development or regeneration

Life is the process of becoming. - Anais Nin

When we’re born we a ball of impulses, feelings, and perceptions. We see things—a tree!—and understand that they are probably not us, but that’s about it. We feel the impulse to cry, so we cry.

At some point the need to cry becomes something we can control. It no longer rules us. We still cry, but we also have some sense of control over it. We become aware of our needs, interests, and desires, and these instead come to rule us. We hurt other people, even those that we love. Although we can control our needs, we can’t control our wants. Desire overflows. We follow cool ideas and cool people not because we believe them or like them, but because of social status. Social reality is a network of transactions, and we’re out for ourself.

After hurting people and hurting ourselves we learn that life is better when we prioritize healthy and stable relationships over personal gain or personal desire. We commit to people and we become our relationships. We struggle for external validation. We become well-adjusted. We dissolve into the social world and can no longer tell what we want. Virtue ethics emerge: Rather than fearing punishment, we fear being a bad person. We can see our needs and desires, but they are set aside in favor of community. We spend years adjusting to society. The sociological imagination emerges. We become obsessed with systems, norms, justice, equality, marginalization, family, and culture. We see ourself through other’s eyes. Although this provides the possibility of self-awareness, it also provides the possibility of being totally wrong about what other people think of us. We imagine others know what we’re insecure about and that they are as fixated on those anxieties as we are. We are constituted by relationships and rules. The self dissolves.

Eventually relationships and mutuality soften. They feel more over there than in here. We no longer depend on the vicarious warmth of others as much as we used to. We understand who we are, what we need, and how our beingness differs from that of other beings. We can see where our opinions begin and those of others end. We’ve seen how helpless it feels for our wellness to be contingent on our external world. Adolescent questions re-emerge, but with a new valence. Answering Who am I? becomes important again, but the question is a different color than it was at eighteen. Social reality does not disappear, but instead becomes something that is also seen rather than just felt. True freedom becomes possible as we regain the opportunity of choice and to be accountable for our those same choices. Slowly, the consequences of our choices begin to feel like helpful feedback rather than an existential threat.

We still cry, and pursue social status, and nurture warm friendships, but the I and we find a unique equilibrium. Our ideological constellation is not pre-formatted template, but has been discovered through the painful process of becoming an adult.