Fitting your skin

When you are young you always feel like you don’t fit your skin in some way. Nothing fits, it all feels too big to comprehend, the emotions that surge are the real growing pains that we all grow through. I was looking at Dillon (our puppy) today and the way he doesn’t fit his skin reminded me a lot of how I was when I was young. That big white eye expression he does which is almost fear awe at everything I can see in him when he looks at me.

As a child the world is your immediate vision. With the days and months then years that pass your world slowly blurs at the edges and expands to your perpetual amazement. You are still safe in the arms of having innocence and the world turns out right most times. Your delicate balance is set to exploration as the limits of everything are tested. The security of your inner world and perception of where your body ends changes and drifts to the point of breaking as you reach double figures.

When you are a teenager everything seems to hurt. It’s like you turn into your teens and what was all before amazing is now just black and full of a deep aching and longing that you haven’t got the emotions to deal with. Your heart is raw with the pain of the world you are now seeing with tears in your eyes. This time is one of dark long nights of staring at rain drops falling on the window and tracing their paths with your finger as you sigh. You see the world through shattered glass fragments and everything seems as fragmented as you feel inside. Reality becomes distilled and the boundaries blur like water colours in salt water tears.

One thing that growing older gives you is perspective. You see your place in the world – maybe you just accept that place more. I don’t remember when I fitted my skin but I really feel like the past few recent years is when I could truly say I was ‘grown up’. I often joke that I only had my puberty at my late 20s, I don’t think I am the only one. The emotions that would overwhelm me before now I can recognise and deal with in ways that don’t lead to hiding under my skin duvet. This is why people end up cutting themselves, to let that pain out in any way they can. People starve themselves to gain control or make themselves so unattractive that the world will leave them alone. A scowl and a dressing down with a large smattering of piercings and attitude, does wanders for getting the world to leave you alone. I did all of these things and look back on it with a realisation of it’s place in my life. Everything I and a great number of people go for is growing pains and when you reach there tail end you see the whole jigsaw for the first time.

I guess it’s part of it that when I see the pain in the eyes of a teenager now I just want to show them there is light and let them glimpse the calm for a brief ecstatic moment to show them it will be alright. The point of course, is going through this. The stripping of the innocence you viewed the world with before as you are born into the adult world. I know it’s just the natural thing for me to want to tell them it will be alright and to stop hurting themselves in a search for a way out of realisation that there is so much bad in the world. To show them the good and that even the second of good is worth a minute of ugly.

This time in my life is one which feels right. Everyone gets that feeling at different times of their life – I think that is one of the points. I maybe took longer, but the journey was worth it and always is. I am a great believer that it’s the journey that is often more important in many ways. Life’s journey is the bit you rush to get through. We rush to grow up, we rush to get to the end. The 30s are turning into a pause point for me. I have arrived at somewhere, it may only be a pause, but it’s a place where I fit and intend to stay a while. The calm that washes over me at this time of my life is one I relish after the unease of growing up. Having just turned 31 isn’t a bad thing for me. I love the feeling of finally fitting my skin. Maybe when I outgrow my skin is when this journey will end – maybe that is the point. Whatever the future has to show me I am confident that the pain of the past is going to make sure everything is more in perspective than it has ever been for me.