Going through a Stage

When I was thirteen, I went through what everyone around me referred to as a stage. The symptoms of this stage were very simple. Every night I would lose a fight with my father, who was bigger and brighter, and I would then storm upstairs into my room. At that point, the various members of my family would nod knowingly at each other and say, “Um, well,. She’s going through a stage.”

In the mid-fifties, this stage was called adolescence, or the terrible teens. Anyone forced through biological circumstances beyond their control to share the dinner table with a sufferer hoped that he or she would get over it as quickly as possible.

The idea was that having passed through adolescence one would inevitably become a grown-up. A grown-up was someone calm, self-assured, realistic and steady. A grown-up was someone who had worked through turbulence and personal conflicts to find serenity and wisdom. By twenty-eight at the latest.

The ideas surrounding grownuphood were like those to do with marriage. You got married and lived happily ever after. There was no mention in the “literature” of dirty dishes, infidelity and quarreling. Similarly, after one became a grown-up one was. Simply was.

Well, it took me a while, but having just passed the stage mark of my fourth decade (the number 35 still sticks in my throat, but I’ll be all right in a week or two), I am beginning to give up on the idea of ever being one. A grown up, that is.

It has begun to occur to me that life is a stage I’m going through.

This is not, you understand, a treatise on reincarnation. It is rather an exploration of a shared sense that we have given up the goal of being a grown-up in favor of the process of growing. Grownuphood was, after all, going to be a rather static place, in which no one was gripped by self-doubt and no one yearned for more.

When I turned thirty, I devised a kind of five-year plan. I figured that by thirty-five – if not now, when? – I would have resolved nine out of ten personal problems. It never occurred to me that I would get any more.

It has taken me five years to give the old conflicts names and origins, and to be able to identify them when they crop up again in few fields. Now I have revised my goals and given up the notion of self-perfection for that of self-knowledge.

And why not? We are. After all, the generation that has made psychology into a major growth industry. Wee’ve bought stock in ourselves, in self-exploration and change. In any case, my new five-year plan is far more modest.

If anyone criticized me, I will simply run away from the table and into my room protesting, “I can’t help it. I’m going through a stage.”

Дата добавления: 2014-12-29