I remember when I was in third grade and my friend decided she wanted to be best friends with another girl. At the time, this felt like the end of the world and everything was crashing down on me. It’s crazy how as you get older, events don’t impact us as much. Even if they do have an effect on us, we know how to move on with life and almost expect those obstacles to reoccur. Sometimes I can’t tell if this is a good or bad thing because the people and actions we care about should impact us. Since we are always waiting for the next bad thing to happen, it doesn’t feel like it did when we were children.
While for some people, adapting to new things can be easy, it can be very difficult for others. This doesn’t necessarily mean losing someone in your life or getting seriously injured; this can even be things like receiving a bad grade or anything out of the ordinary. Even at the age of 20, it still impacts me if I feel someone drifting out of my life when I thought they would be with me forever. It becomes even more challenging when people, including yourself, keep saying that it is all reality and things like this typically happen more than once in your life. Being told to move on and go about your normal routine is hard when these people or events in your life become routine.
It’s not that adapting to these events gets easier; more is going on in life as you get older, so these events are suddenly not allowed to be the only thing on your mind. When you are a kid, your best friend or crush is the one thing on your mind all day without a doubt. Then as you grow up, you have bills to pay, a career to work towards, school to succeed in, sports to play that actually impact your future, etc. If you lose a friend or some guy doesn’t like you back, it is not going to put all the other responsibilities in life on pause. This is what allows adults to keep going through the motions, which is sad in the sense that we don’t get much time to stop and feel emotions.
While it can be challenging to have to adapt to obstacles without even processing them, there are ways to cope and grieve when bad events occur. Even though bills do not stop, school keeps going, and your future is counting on you, these pressures should not prevent you from being mentally and physically healthy. Life is also about balance and it is okay to miss out on a couple hours of that work shift to take a second to comprehend it all or to ask your teacher for an extra day to turn that assignment in. Most of the time, bosses or professors understand that life isn’t always going to be easy because they go through it as well.
We are all human, which means we are made to have emotions, therefore we are allowed to grieve and not always be okay 24 hours, seven days a week. We are not kids anymore, and while this does mean that obstacles can’t set us back to the start of our progress, it doesn’t mean that we have to act like it didn’t happen. Being adaptable to the challenges of life is a quality that not everyone can say they have because it is difficult to not let people and their actions impact us. Therefore, do not be afraid to take some time for yourself and allow those changes to process before adapting.