adulthood – Muddled Soma

I have not written my 500 words in a while. A few people have reached out to ask why. So, why not write 500 words about that! The lie I tell myself is that life got busy. The authentic answer I have not been interested in facing is that it started to hurt beyond what I could bear.

For months, I sat down every day and gave myself over to the keyboard. Some days the words came easily. Most days they did not. I thought I was spending a year writing about coming of age, but that was fucking naïve. I was trying to become the little boy who finally mattered. That is the lie old wounds tell. If I can remember hard enough, explain it well enough, or tell the story one more time, maybe I can negotiate a better childhood. Of course, that deal does not exist. The past has never renegotiated a better contract.

I believe adulthood begins when I finally let go of the childhood I did not get. I have not been able to shake that thought.

When I look back through my writing and my memories, I realize I have carried two sets of recollections for most of my life. There are the memories of what happened, and then there are the memories of what should have happened. Oddly enough, it is the second set that has always been heavier. They have followed me into relationships, parenting, work, travel, and eventually into my writing. Without realizing it, I was asking 500 words a day to build a bridge backward instead of forward. Every sentence became another attempt to earn something that should have been freely given to a little boy decades ago. No wonder I was so fucking exhausted!

I finally realized the pain was not coming from remembering. It was coming from hope. Hope that one more page, one more memory, one more honest paragraph might somehow change yesterday. I kept trying to convince the past to tell a different story. It never did as some stories are not waiting to be rewritten. They are waiting to be grieved.

Nobody talks much about grieving the childhood that never happened. I am not talking about pretending everything was terrible. I am talking about grieving the hugs that never came, the words that were never spoken, and the moments that quietly shaped my understanding of my own worth. I think there are versions of me that never had the chance to exist because I spent so much energy trying to become enough for someone else.

No one is coming to hand that little boy the childhood he deserved. There is no hidden chapter where everything suddenly makes sense and everyone finally says what I needed to hear. There is only me… now. And I am a fifty-two-year-old man who refuses to spend the rest of my life dragging that kid into the future, hoping tomorrow will somehow fix yesterday. Instead, I choose to sit beside him, thank him for surviving, and tell him he does not have to keep fighting anymore.

I still believe writing saves lives. It certainly has helped save mine. I just finally realized I was asking it to do something it could never do. I was asking words to resurrect the past instead of helping me live more honestly in the present.

Maybe growing up is not becoming someone new. Maybe it is accepting that childhood has no do-overs, nor can it be completed at a later date. It cannot be repaired by achievement, success, travel, love, or another five hundred words. Adulthood begins the moment I stop asking today to pay yesterday’s debts.

I think I finally understand why those 500 words became so painful. I was not writing to remember. I was writing to recover something that was never coming back. There is a difference.

The real work was never bringing that little boy back, but rather thanking him for surviving… and finally letting him rest.

July 2026
M	T	W	T	F	S	S
	1	2	3	4	5
6	7	8	9	10	11	12
13	14	15	16	17	18	19
20	21	22	23	24	25	26
27	28	29	30	31

Prompt – What role did you play in your family?

I was the baby in my family. My brother and sister were older than me by several years, old enough that by the time I reached preteen age, they were already gone. My brother went into the military. My sister married into the military. Apparently, the military was the family business. The house grew quieter. The orbit shifted.

As the baby, I watched. Silence felt safe. Observation felt necessary. While others reacted, I absorbed. While the room moved, I stayed still long enough to understand what was actually happening. Being the youngest meant I was present without authority. Decisions were made above my pay grade and explanations were optional at best. I learned to read tone before words and posture before intention. I noticed how laughter sometimes arrived too quickly, how stories and jokes could function like smoke, how playfulness could smooth over things no one wanted to face directly. I understood the role of distraction even when I refused to perform it. Instead of entertaining, I studied the moment the room needed to be entertained.

I became the observer because no one asked me to be anything else. I was small enough to disappear and quiet enough to be underestimated. That invisibility became access. I watched tension build and release. I watched who needed to be soothed and who needed to stay unaware. I noticed who carried the emotional weight and who benefited from keeping it unnamed. I learned that some roles exist to protect the system rather than the people inside it. Those patterns mattered to me even when naming them made others uncomfortable.

Somewhere in all that watching, I became the storyteller. Not the loud one. Not the funny one. Just the keeper of the stories. I held the version of events that existed before they were softened. I remembered what came before the joke and what never made it into the retelling. I learned that stories shift depending on who is listening and that truth is often traded for comfort without anyone admitting the exchange.

The storyteller role was lonely. It meant holding meaning without a place to set it down. It meant knowing things too early or too clearly. It meant understanding that telling the truth outright could destabilize a balance everyone depended on, even if that balance was fragile and false. So I learned patience. I learned restraint. I learned to let stories mature until they could be told without blowing the room apart. I learned that timing matters as much as honesty.

I did not soothe my family through story. I soothed myself by understanding the stories. I organized chaos into narrative, or at least I tried to. I tracked cause and effect. I stitched moments together into something coherent so I could survive them. That instinct followed me into adulthood, into classrooms, into leadership, into writing. I still sit quietly at first. I still watch how people move when they think no one is paying attention. I still tell stories not to entertain, but to reveal.

Tag: adulthood

What Should Have Happened

Finders Keepers – Day 16