Becoming of Age

I feel like people experience their transformation into an adult at different parts of their life. But what does it mean if you are an “adult”. The technical version is when you’re older than 18, but you may not be mentally 18 at that time. When you grow up, that’s when people start noticing that you are older, and in my opinion the one biggest aspect of when you have grown up is being able to retaliate after facing any problems. Now, retaliate doesn’t mean an act, it means being able to ‘bounce back’ from any obstacles and work harder to get through it. I am in the bounce back stage currently, as I just faced news that my childhood self would have crashed out over. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, one of the premier colleges in North Carolina and my dream school for the longest time. I opened that admissions letter, thinking that I would be able to get in, and instead I got flat out rejected. No remorse shown from them, just a brutal “We don’t want you here” type of admission letter. I couldn’t accept the fact that they didn’t want me, because I thought I was everything UNC wanted. I had the academics, the athletics, helping my community, and yet none of it was enough. I started questioning myself, am I really as smart as I thought I was? Why did I really think I was going to get accepted into UNC? For a whole day I just rotted in bed, thinking that no matter what I was going to do I was completely useless. Then, my mom came in and told me something I would never forget. “Nobody says its this easy the first time. It’s all about how much better you will be the second and third time.” I didn’t really understand what she meant at first, then it started to click for me. You will always have problems in life, and it isn’t about how you are in that situation in the first place, rather is about how are you gonna be better after that. That was pretty much the beginning of me growing up, learning to stop taking things very seriously, rather accept that something happened, and do everything I can to be better from that moment onwards. That is what it means to grow up, to be mature enough to accept flaws and problems and move on from that.