Growing up and staying young

There’s a strange paradox occurring in our society and it’s this. Young children seem to be ‘growing up’ earlier and earlier, with the clothes they wear and the way they talk, but us in our twenties seem to be stuck as ‘young’ for too long. It’s weird. Young girls wear more make up than I do, have mobile phones and talk about boys when I was playing with barbies at their age. I, on the other hand, frequently find myself thinking people my age are too young to be getting married/having children etc and that this all seems something far off in an ‘adult’ life. So what are we now? I think we’re confused.

People used to be forced to grow up way too quickly, take on adult responsibilities before they really should – some people still are. So, that we now live in a society where the first thing you should do when you leave university or college or whatever is be thinking about getting married and starting a home is great. The thing is, I think we’ve forgotten that we now have the choice how to live our lives and that if we feel it’s right to get married when we’re 21 then so be it. Why not? Most of our parents probably did.

I’m not solely blaming our attitudes towards marriage for this “you’re too young” attitude but I do think that the taking away – by changing laws and attitudes in a good way – things our parents/grandparents had to do that then forced them to grow up and be an ‘adult’ may have had a slightly detrimental effect as well. When we constantly hear “you’re so young, you don’t have to worry about that” or “they’re far too young to be getting married” it forces us into the mindset of ‘we’re basically still children’. We’re just playing at life in a bigger playpen. We don’t have the right to decide what is right for our lives or how we want to live them. Surely the matter should be whether we’re mentally ready; do we know who we are, do we know our own minds? Some people know their own minds when they’re five, others don’t figure it out until they’re fifty. Age – as with most things in life – really has nothing to do with it.

Just as with young girls who wear makeup, bras and fashion clothing – society should stop forcing ways of being onto people and just let us be.

Finding confidence

I am increasingly aware that I really should be a more confident person – a thought that tends to make you obsess about your own confidence levels so much they begin to decrease rapidly as you fall into a spiral of too much self awareness. Either way, I am working on being one of those people who is totally assured of what they’re saying and being how and who they are. A few days ago I met a director who was so intimidatingly confident I pretty much lost the ability to speak and spent the time afterwards kicking myself for being such an idiot. She happens to be American, and Americans happen to be more confident I don’t know why.

In this profession it is of supreme importance to be confident, to know how to make others believe in your ideas and have faith in you. Funnily enough I can do this really well when it isn’t my own personal work being discussed. I think though, really, confidence is something you wear like a really hot dress that you know you look great in. It’s something you have to get practised at putting on every morning and not revealing to people that it isn’t your most natural state of being. Because, as far as I’m aware, anyone artistic tends to be a blend of extremely arrogant and extremely self deprecating – a blend that makes true confidence challenging.