The Messy Middle of Growing Up
A ceremony offers a definite moment: now you are a man, or woman, or more broadly an adult. But the transition to adulthood is rarely a single, clean step; more often, it is a series of stumbles. The following works explore the messy middle years, where childhood collides with the expectations of tradition, society, and self-identity. As you explore them, consider: is adulthood a destination you reach or a mask you learn to wear?
- Gwendolyn Brooks | “We Real Cool” (1963)
- Virginia Driving Hawk Sneve | “The Medicine Bag” (1975)
- Carol Ann Duffy | “In Mrs. Tilscher’s Class” (1990)
- Joss Whedon | “Where Do We Go From Here?” (2001)
- Karen Russell | “Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves” (2006)
- Ruth B | “Lost Boy” (2015)
- Major Jackson | “Let Me Begin Again” (2021)
A ceremony can declare 'now you are an adult' in a single afternoon. Real life rarely cooperates. Becoming an adult is usually a series of stumbles — pool players skipping school, a boy clutching his grandfather's medicine bag in embarrassment, a Lost Boy who never wants to grow up. These works live in the awkward in-between, where childhood collides with everything the world expects you to become.
Key concepts
- The Messy Transition
- Unlike a clean ceremony, real growing up is full of false starts and contradictions — these works dwell in the turbulence where you're no longer a child but not yet sure how to be an adult.
- Destination Vs. Performance
- The topic's central image: is being an adult a place you arrive at and feel, or a role you perform — a 'mask' — acting grown-up until others, and maybe you, believe it?
- Identity And Belonging
- Many of these works show young people caught between worlds — tradition and modernity, the self they were and the self they're told to be — searching for where they fit.
- Resisting Adulthood
- Some characters rush toward grown-up rebellion; others, like Peter Pan's Lost Boys, refuse to grow up at all — the works explore both the pull toward adulthood and the longing to escape it.
What to know
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These works reject the clean ceremony: each shows growing up as stumbling and incomplete — pool-hall rebellion, embarrassed acceptance of heritage, refusal to grow at all — together arguing adulthood is a messy process, not a single moment you cross.
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