*From a writing prompt in my monthly writer’s group.
I am in my infancy still when it comes to adult growth.
Can an infant even take baby steps, or would those still be way too large for me?
Ego growth, denial growth, willful ignorance growth, now those I excel at. In that sense I’ve really grown.
But adult growth….as in making good choices and feeling empowered and invigorated…I don’t remember that from the reading.
Is adult growth going to be on the test?
Because if so, is there some kind of worksheet or something?
How do I know when I’m growing adultly? Instead of growing in my confusion, or error or waist line.
How can you tell growth from the motion of careening, unknowingly, unceasingly toward certain mental disaster, total annihilation, or unfathomable catastrophe?
No, I’m really asking. This is not rhetorical. How can you tell?
How can you tell expansion and awakening apart from a psychotic break?
I don’t know because it seems the symptoms might be very similar:
You lose interest in normal conversation
You don’t understand how everyone can’t see the rigged game
You overcome some addictions and justify others
Your mind no longer constrained by logic, leaps curiously, almost crazily, from shiny object to shinier one.
You are eerily calm when culture says its freak out time.
And you let go of the need to control others
Seeming too permissive
So the rigid can become so dismissive
And write the supervisor a strongly worded missive
Old fears begin to stop haunting
And old dreams start to seem less daunting
And your achievements need less flaunting
So you wander through life more solo
A solitary fool looking for a tribe to belong to
The only thing separating you from the truly crazy might be a sandwich board and the ability to string thoughts together, well mostly.
In a world of insanity being sane is revolutionary, almost crazy making, because you see the backwards, inverted nature of the society we’ve built collectively, and you are the only one with any questions about why it doesn’t seem to work quite right.
