Growing Up Fast

_{Photo by Etienne Boulanger}

It turned out that I grew up too fast and I didn't really knew this until I entered the university five years ago and started to really mingle with people within my age range and that was when I found out that to some of them, I act a little bit too matured.

It was kinda surprising to me at first because to me, I felt like everyone my age should be this matured but it turned out that wasn't the case. But then I remembered that I have two elder brothers and I would always hang out with them and their friends and I saw how they handled things the big boys way, and even though it didn't occur to me at the time because I was little, but it turned out I was absorbing everything they did and how they did it and somewhere down the line, I just felt like that was the way everyone else behaves and understood things, so I found myself acting that way too.

I remember how irritated I would feel when my friends back then couldn't do certain things like being too scared to have serious conversations with the opposite sex, simply because they were shy. I remember one of my friends who had asked a guy to tell her how he feels about her in a text and not say it to her face, even though he was standing right infront of her.

The whole thing felt so childish and for a moment there, I felt I was friends with a kid who couldn't even have a matured conversation with a man she claims to have feelings for. But as time went on, I soon realized that my upbringing and the environment I always found myself in while growing up was what helped in building that self-esteem that I now enjoy and that many other people were not privileged to have elders brother to walk with and learn from them.

So maybe I grew up fast, but I'm glad my brother's friends weren't the type to smoke and do all sort of bad stuff because those would had also rubbed off on me as well. Luckily for me, majority of the things I learnt from them (even though at the time I had no idea I was learning), were the good stuff. And now it feels like I have this superpower over my peers because I can have any type of conversation I want with anybody and not be shy about it, while them, they struggle to even tell the opposite sex how they feel about them.