Growing Pains
The price of a new perspective
I’ve struggled with this post for a while. I’ve been trying to write this for weeks, but somehow, the words didn’t feel right. I kept writing and abandoning my writing - not knowing what I wanted to say. Today, I’m back in the city where my adult life truly began, and a flood of emotions brought me back to writing - to try and make sense of it.
The hard path forward
Decades ago, fresh out of business school, I came to this city for a job. For my family, the idea of me being on my own in the ‘big, bad city’ of New Delhi was terrifying. I had grown up sheltered, protected in small Army cantonments where everyone knew each other and a certain order prevailed. When I first moved here, my father visited me every few weeks for a few months, convincing me to give up on this idea and to come home. I did have my share of terrifying moments in this new city - the comfort of the familiar was a powerful lure, and it was so tempting to give in and go back to safety and familiarity. But I stayed. I didn't stay because I was in love with my new life; I stayed because I just knew I couldn’t—and wouldn't—go backward.
This feeling of being unable to go back is at the heart of what I’ve been wrestling with recently. The past few weeks have been tough emotionally - nothing specific has happened to make this time tough. It’s just been a series of conversations and interactions with people I’ve known for a while. People who are acting exactly as they always have, like I expect them to. But somehow these reactions are landing differently with me now. They hurt more and things I was once able to brush aside, I just can’t do it anymore.
A part of me is angry with myself. I want to be able to let go and move on, because if I don’t, I risk these connections and relationships and I don’t want to lose more relationships. Part of me feels that the right thing to do is to move forward, but somehow, the courage that I had in my youth feels more elusive now. Another part of me wants to give in, to just find a familiar spot and be. The challenge then, is how I can stay true to my own self while preserving my connections. What is the balance? Is that even possible?
The cost of conformity vs questioning
The struggle between belonging and individuality is not unique to me and is not new to humanity. I think all of us deal with it, even if we don’t explicitly wrestle with it as much as I do. We find the balance between conforming and questioning. I believe that midlife is likely the time when this struggle becomes central. When we’re younger, we learn to operate through a set of rules and norms handed to us by our families and communities. We don't have enough life experience to question them, and they serve as a useful guide for getting us on our way. But as we accumulate experiences, we are equipped to challenge those long-held assumptions. Some of us choose to do it more than others.
Some people choose to stick to the original blueprint, finding comfort and predictability in the familiar rules and rituals. Perhaps they pay a price for this choice, even though it is a quiet one: the slow, insidious loss of an authentic self. Perhaps it is soft and slow enough that it is not noticed. On the other hand, the cost of questioning is immediate and often painful. It’s the disruption of the familiar and the unsettling feeling of being cast out of old ways of life. The more you step away from the norms, the more distance you put between your old life and all it’s familiar trappings and the more isolated you feel.
Growth sounds glamorous, like it's always the "right thing to do." (I even wrote about it in my last post - Improving or Growing) But it can be profoundly painful to grow and leave the familiar behind. It's like a painful rebirth—you are shedding the skin of who you once were, but the new skin is still raw and vulnerable. This is the constant tension of this stage of life for me: the longing for a simple, predictable life versus the undeniable need to honor the person I am becoming. There isn’t one right way - it’s a choice we make every day, and with every choice, we get to live with the beautiful, messy, and often painful consequences of both.
Forward, backward and sideways
I don’t have answers today or a neat, 3 step framework. All I can say is that sometimes, maybe many times, it's okay to choose comfort over growth? To trade a little forward momentum for the familiar embrace of what we already know. Perhaps to fortify ourselves before taking that next painful step towards growth. And if you’re taking that step away from the comfortable, I want you to know you are brave and you are laying the path for others to follow.
If this resonates with you, I invite you to join the conversation. What are you wrestling with? What choices are you making today?
Loved it. A couple of parts resonated with me the most.
1. “…the courage that I had in my youth feels more elusive now.” I have experienced this myself in my 65th year. And then I shake myself and metaphorically slap myself on my cheeks. I tell myself, “Inder, you would never have been scared to do this when you were 20 years old. Why are you scared now? Go back to that energy. Forget the years on the clock. What you were at that young age is your trueest self. Embrace it again.”
2. Then there is the flip side: What wise people say, that we make our mental maps of what we want out of our life when we are very young, often in our teenage years. And we keep being driven by the same mental map all lifelong. We never stop to ask ourselves if the mental map we made at such a young age is still the right map for us. I often ask myself, “Inder, if you still want exactly what you wanted at age 20, what have you learned in the intervening 45 years?“
I see that I don’t have a ready answer! Oh well, this is the push and pull of life. Always an opportunity for growth :-)
I am amazed at how coherently you put into words what, I'm sure, plenty of people are feeling. The pain that comes from the tacit censure of others as well as self-doubt when you try to break away from the normal is familiar. And I say 'try to' because often patterns in relationships are impossible to change, especially if only one side feels the discomfort.