Fragments of me

I’m fumbling

Stumbling and crumbling, gathering discarded pieces of myself as they flake off along the way. I press onward, my arms overflowing with fragments of me.

Fumbling and stumbling…crumbling…

…and humbling.

No one ever said it would be easy, so I should stop pretending it is.

Adulting is fucking difficult. Balancing life shouldn’t be this hard.

Dealing with emotions I know are normal but also recognize as irrational or selfish or dramatic is tough. Have I not outgrown jealousy? Am I not too old to be threatened? Should I not be immune to heartbreak or rage?

No.

We’re adults. Not robots.

Can you imagine us as adult robots? There’s my next speculative fiction novel. Adults engineered into robots at 18 so they can handle responsibility and success without pesky feelings. Execution, no emotion. Objectives, no adventure.

Here’s the thing… there can’t be happy without the sad sometimes. There can’t be success without some failure.

Adulting doesn’t mean you can’t feel the same emotions you’ve always felt. I suppose it means I can’t slap Janet across the face when she insults me…I should probably use big girl words instead. But I can still freely feel that fury stemming from her ignorance. Human emotion and reaction will never go away, no matter how old or advanced we become.

How we handle inevitable floods of sudden emotion is what makes us an adult. I’ve evolved. How I handle emotion now is much different from how I handled it as a child.

Publicly, anyway.

I mean… I might throw myself to the floor and scream for chocolate in private… but that’s my business.

The point here, I think, is that sometimes I handle emotion well… like an adult should. Other times I don’t. But I do learn from that. I pick up those pieces and continue down this unpredictable journey called life