I’ve always been aware that maturity and physical age are two very different things. Yes, maturity can come with age, simply because the older you are, the more time you’ve had to learn and grow as a person, but the two aren’t interdependent.
You see, for whatever reason, I matured emotionally much faster than my peers.
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Even in high school I was often more comfortable chatting with teachers than other teens.
It’s simply that some of the strange choices and behaviors of my peers baffled me.
Maybe I came by it naturally, or my home situation forced me to learn quickly, or maybe it’s simply that I read a lot.
Reading teaches a person a lot about how other people tick.
There are plenty of studies showing a correlation between reading fiction and a person’s ability to empathize with other people’s situations.
Of course, correlation and causation aren’t the same thing.
Do I understand the plights of others more because I read or do I read because I’m empathetic and drawn to the stories of other people?
But I was still a kid back then and still growing up physically. I definitely did some irrational things.
What teen hasn’t?
Now I’m in my thirties and I see childhood friends who still seem to be making those irrational choices even when the consequences are so much more dire.
I seem to be that person in the friend group that everyone else comes to for rational advice.
They might describe an argument from their perspective and I’ll point out something from the other point of view that seems obvious to me, and that stops them in their tracks.
It’s not necessarily that they’re ignorant, but that it simply did not occur to them. I may have saved a few jobs this way.
Because talking back to a teacher may get you detention, but talking back to your boss could get you fired.
And getting fired from a job often knocks down the wobbly dominoes of other choices, such as living beyond your means with tons of debt.
One can give advice, but until the other person learns from their own mistakes, maturity will struggle to grow, regardless of the date on their birth certificate.
