Outgrowing your age

While some believe age is just a number, I see age and aging as a stage, a phase filled with responsibilities, detailed on management, where time is expensive, and measured by achievement than ability, and acceptance or rejection determined by resource.

For some, the measurements at which we have grown or outgrown are calculated by the number of things we do, hsve done, should do and should be able to do. Say for instance, the kinds of post you make on your WhatsApp status, the kinds of broadcast messages we send out, and infact, choose not to send, or the minute things such as sending out New month messages, which we find as immature.

Ageing feels like a betrayal, especially when you have a responsibility to fulfil; to others, and also to yourself. I feel the worst of all responsibility is not those targeted by family and ‘others’, but the responsibility to oneself. I feel so because you can either achieve success or not, which in all honestly gives you no trouble, only a sad look and a trophy of disappointment.

However, the responsibility to yourself requires you to be better for yourself, but when you are not, the aftermath is on you. The worst of all is you being disappointed by yourself. You then ask yourself why it isn’t working. It becomes harder to understand what your anger is or to know what isn’t working.

Whether or not it is the decision you made or your inability to live by the expectations.You begin to realise slowly that survival requires a good sense of humour rather than sleep, food, and breath, and your ability to survive depends on your in(ability) to live daily with(out) these. While you age, you begin to align your fears with the older ones on whether or not you would find a compatible wo(man) to marry or be able to achieve what your role model achieved and more. You’re expected to do better than the current and expected to achieve more than what is, and when you’re not, even when not condemned to the cross, you are condemned by age. You begin to think how you could have achieved more for someone your age, or what you could be or have been before, or as someone your age. Worse of all is the comparison with someone your age or, not being better than someone not your age.

Now, the problem is not ageing, but the expectation to grow before our age.

– Collins, Alilonu