Adulthood didn’t greet me; it mourned me, quietly replacing my teenage soul with silence, weight and a world that never said: ‘It’s okay to be scared’.
The fact that there is no word “teen” in me hurts more than anything.
I didn’t want to enter the adult world because there was no ribbon, no celebration, no doorway filled with warmth. No one stood there waiting with open arms to grab my hand and say, “Welcome, you’ve made it.”
It didn’t arrive with celebration, it arrived like a funeral procession, silent and heavy, the celebration of a mourning soul.
The word “adult” feels like a stain on every person’s life. I hate to wear that stain. It’s a scar that others call maturity, and I have to carry it forever.
It’s the grief of sudden transition, without guidance. It’s not the darkness that’s scary, it’s the world. A world where I’m not allowed to stumble or fumble, because my small mistakes will be televised on the big screen for everyone to see. In this world, little mistakes become your identity before you even learn how to fix them.
They say, “We teach them how to walk,” but who’s going to teach us how to walk into storms?
Who will teach us how to carry loneliness like a shield? They say we’ll manage everything. But how? It’s one person versus the world, a war of facing things alone. It’s the loneliness of carrying burdens no one prepared us for. This phase demands responsibility, independence, and the earning of respect because in adulthood, a person with nothing is given no respect.
In this world, you must become something just to be heard. Your achievements feel like illusions, your worth becomes measurable. It’s a world of disguises. A world full of pits. And what if we fail? There won’t be helping hands, only stares.
Our parents, who once picked us up with joy, now watch silently with expectations. And yes, nothing will be the same again. We’ll be haunted by the guilt of relying on them. We’ll mess up our sleep cycles.
We’ll fall into abysses. We’ll no longer be the person we once were. We’ll become monsters of emptiness. And in the mirror, we won’t see ourselves, just a reflection of what the world has moulded us into,
Figures of exposure. Shells of survival.
There will be only flesh, but no essence.
Motion, but no meaning.
Joy will feel like a forgotten language.
Every day, we will mourn instead of celebrate because happiness no longer knocks. It waits outside, wondering if it’s still welcome. Our souls will mourn, not just the world, but the self we left behind.
Our minds will become abysses. Sleep will become a battlefield. Sadness will be our companion. Grief will be an old friend, sleeping beside us.
We quietly mourn the loss of our teenage years not because they were easy, but because adulthood arrived too suddenly, too harshly, and without anyone saying
“It’s okay to be scared.”