Growing Up

By: Shruti Gupta

3rd year, B.A(Hons.) Sociology

Design: Ragini

The great revelation of growing old is that you don’t have to be perfect—or even good—because time itself is quietly lending a hand.

As life winds on, bringing you face-to-face with people whose beliefs and experiences challenge your own, you start to see the world for what it truly is: a quilt of viewpoints, individual, flawed, and shaped indelibly by the identities who made the work possible.

Before, in my mind, there was only one reality, only clear things; there was no shade of gray, only good people and bad people, only truth and lies. But the more I’ve listened, the more I’ve experienced, the more I’ve realized: no one has all the answers. No one is totally right, as in no one can be said to be fully wrong. We all have some parts of the narrative that are unique to us only, and no one else has the full picture of. But even when someone is willing to try to empathize, when they are willing to listen and stretch out their arms, when they are present for another in the purest sense of the word, they will always be missing something. Their views will always be colored by what they know or think they know.

Yes, that is perhaps the ironic truth about growing up and becoming all that one can be, but losing those childhood fantasies too!!

Accepting that in the times, which are ever ensuing, understanding will never be perfect, will always be a little incomplete, and that even empathy has its limits. Where perception of actions, which would otherwise leave you completely bewildered, could seem quite logical from another individual’s perspective. And then what used to appear to be black and white begins to blur—not because there isn’t right and wrong; but because the truth is more complex than you ever could have known.

This shift changes you. It softens your judgments, so to say. You no longer care about debating to sort out who’s right and who’s wrong. Instead, you start appreciating something else: the simple act of listening. Allowing another’s narrative to be real and legitimate, leaving it in that position beside your own, even when the other narrative challenges you, even when it makes you uncomfortable…

But it’s not always easy. Growth never is. Sometimes you wake with anger that you are lost in the space between what you know and what others know. And maybe that’s the most beautiful realization of all: I accept seeing the world as a dot connecting a game of with and without, imperfect perhaps, but that does not make anyone less worthy.