Declaration of principles: I don't want to grow up.

This morning I was talking to my mum and she told me something that got me thinking. I’ll put you in context. I was just scrolling down my Twitter timeline on my phone and I saw a picture of the actor Peter Capaldi as the new Doctor in the TV show Doctor Who, something that got me really excited, and she asked me about what I had seen. When I showed her she just looked at me as if I was some sort of alien and whispered “you really need to grow up”. She repeats that phrase many times a day; that I need to grow up and be mature, that I’m not a teenager anymore and this sort of stuff is just for teenagers whose only problem in life is what they’re going to wear the next morning to school.

And I find myself highly disagreeing with her for a number of reasons. First, teenagers and young adults do have problems; the only difference with adults is that their problems are different. For an adult, the loss of a job or an argument with the boss is really important, but for a teenager an argument with a friend is as equally important as it is for the adult the argument with the boss. At that age friends are the most important thing in our lives, and sometimes parents don’t seem to get it, they seem to have forgotten what they felt about their friends when they were teens. Many adults (at least in my family) have forgotten what it’s like to be a teenager, what it feels like, how confusing it is at times, and that disdain or contempt they get from adults, as if adults know everything about life and teens still know nothing, is not the best answer they could have.

I have been at the receiving end of those looks of contempt that many times, even now, when I’m a 22 year old woman who’s finishing the degree and is working to get enough money to, at least, pay for the things I want but don’t need (concerts and that sort of thing). The point is that my mum thinks that because I like watching TV shows and music so much, I’m not mature enough. Every time this past month I told her I was excited because I was going to see the Doctor Who special at the cinema, she would just look at me strangely and say “you’re wasting money for nothing”.

I don’t intend to defend myself here; it could be true that I need to grow up; everybody is different and of course everybody has different opinions. But as I see it, all I’m doing is live. And I don’t really know about other adults but I’ve observed my mum for long enough now, and I know she’s not passionate about anything at all in her life. She just… is. She wakes up, goes to work, saves some money to go to the beach in summer… but that’s it. It’s like she’s watching her life passing in front of her eyes but does nothing about it. She doesn’t feel marveled in front of a piece of art in a museum, she doesn’t feel emotion when a really good and emotional song is on the radio, she doesn’t watch documentaries about curious things on telly… when she’s not working she just sits there, watching Belén Esteban and other people talking about celebrities’ lives and problems or gossiping about the people in town, as if that made her feel better about her own life.

I don’t want to judge her because this would be neither my place nor the suitable place to do it, but it got me thinking as to how we see life itself. In this context of crisis, and not only economic crisis but also a crisis of values, where in Spain we see that people are put in jail for stealing food but bankers and politicians who’ve lied and have stolen the people huge amounts of money are set free or even protected from the “bad people” who want them in jail; I think it’s very important to manage to feel marveled. To feel excitement running through your veins, it doesn’t matter if it’s due to a song, a TV show you really like or a novel you're writing as it is my case right now. To be able to wake up, look at the people surrounding you and be able to smile, even when everything seems so grey. When we see people who can’t pay for the rent of their flats and are evicted mercilessly; when we see our rights as workers and as citizens being reduced every single day, with the shadow of Francoism planning over our heads and with the memory of the dictatorship still so raw in hundreds of people’s minds; when what we hear from politicians and what we see in the streets is as opposing as day and night… in these times, it’s more important than ever to stay strong and not letting go of life, the real life, that life where every morning we felt excited about the day ahead. You could say is a denial to growing up, a desire to stay as a child where worries were lesser and it was easier to be happy. You could also say is simply ignorance, that once we know what the world is like and what we’re doing to the world and to the people in it it’s impossible to feel happy or excited.

But I don’t see it that way. I see it as a leitmotif, the way you want to live your life. A declaration of principles, if you like. And in this time, if I can feel excited, marveled or happy about my life, even if it’s because of a TV show, I’m glad I haven’t grown up yet. Because if growing up means stop feeling this way,  and feeling that every single day for the next 50 years is going to be exactly the same, I never want to grow up. What's the point in living if you aren't alive, anyway?