Project Log 2 – Story

I’ve talked to a lot of my friend about this topic over the last few days and I’ve heard a lot of stories that are quiet different, somewhat different from what I had envisioned at the beginning, and it means that everyone has a very different understanding about the growing up:

The first group, as same as my story, all had a clearly moment of feeling grown up. I asked them about the sounds they heard in that moment. The cries of a newborn baby, the sound of a hospital radio calling the patient’s family. The squeak of a chair when his father stood up and missed it (he told me that he felt his father was older in that moment). Another friend told me that when he was child and people told him he can not buy alcohol until he is 18, he desperately wanted to be an adult, but of course it was a joke. Few years ago, his parent will remind him it is time for sleeping, but from one day, they started to stop reminding him and just turned off the living room light and went back to their room (he told me that at that moment he felt that his parents no longer controlled him like a child).

The second situation is that there is no very special, clear-cut moment, they feel that growing up is the process which is very slow and take a long tome. They feel that they grow up slowly and when they realized, they are already grown up. I actually went to ask my mother this question and she gave me the same answer, she said that she had thought about it very carefully for three days and there was no such a moment.

The third one is that did not realize and have no feeling about growing up. Thomas told me that the place where he lived has not been changed since he was born, so when he was child, his family told him that when you leave the place and go out, you grow up. After he finished his high school study he had a two-year travel experience, which he felt was very special for him and he saw a lot of different things. When I asked him the question do you think you have grown up, the answer he gave me was that he didn’t know. Another friend of mine told me she didn’t feel she had grown up yet, even though she had been working for a few years.

The fourth scenario is that they feel the moment but they choose to run away. That girl told me she wanted to try to escape for the rest of her life. This is actually a state which I envy, to be a child forever.