Growing up is every child’s dream to be an astronaut, a doctor, or an explorer: to finally become a grown-up seems to be a huge achievement when you are little. Although, adult life can be the perfect illusion for those who are excited to grow up.
What does your inner child think?
When we are little, the only thing we think of is growing up: we dream of being the big superhero we saw in our favorite movie or an astronaut to go to the moon. However, when people get older, they realize that growing up is not this amazing fantasy your inner child was expecting to be. Solving problems on your own and dealing with internal traumas can be really heartbreaking news to give to the little kid inside your heart, and now every grown-up has a dream of becoming a child again.
The perfect idea of having the house of your dreams when becoming an adult can be a real deal breaker when you realize how things work, and how capitalism works. Realizing that, in order to get a house, you will have to work for years in a job you might hate is a stressful thing to understand, noticing how everything revolves around money and how hard it is to gain it, is life-changing.
The Peter Pan Syndrome
In 1983, the psychologist Dan Kiley first coined the syndrome term in his book The Peter Pan Syndrome: Men Who Have Never Grown Up, where the doctor studied a type of pattern behavior in men that happened after experiencing how exhausting adult life can be without the “fairy dust of childhood”, and due to all of this stress, they could develop Peter Pan Syndrome.
This syndrome awakens childish and insecure behaviors in individuals, preventing them from maturing normally. Therefore, they end up failing in recognizing that adult life has already arrived.But who is Peter Pan and why Dan Kiley used his name for the syndrome? A character created by J.M Barrie in the novel “The Little White Bird” that later on was used in a play named Peter and Wendy which they became the main character in a children’s book.
Peter Pan is a young boy who lives the island of Neverland with Tinker Bell his best friend and the Lost Boys, who are a group of lost children that Peter found and brought to the island so they could never grow up and be kids forever just like him; In the story Peter reaches out to London looking for a girl named Wendy, his love interest, to take her with him to Neverland.
Does it have to be all so hard?
Realizing that you have become an adult and that your time as a child is over can be hard, but that does not mean that you can not make this time as a young adult great – like your childhood -, but it will be completely different: you will have responsibilities and problems to solve; however, that does not mean your inner child needs to be abandoned in the process, you can put a little bit of fairy dust in your life to make it more magical.
Not letting stress take control of your life helps you to deal with your problems and responsibilities in a light way, so you can relax and make your moments as an adult memorable to yourself. Remember that your routine, although complicated, can be more relaxing to your mental health by not pushing yourself too far and taking care of your emotions. It is important to make your journey in this world more happy, in the way you believe it can be. Adulthood does not have to be so hard if you do not want it to.
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The article above was edited by Camila Lutfi.
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