A Letter To Those Who Won’t Stop Growing Grace Joseph

A LETTER TO THOSE WHO WON’T STOP GROWING

Grace Joseph Grace McManus Joseph

grow (verb): to spring up and develop to maturity.

13 To those who won’t stop growing, Today’s world is, for want of a better word, messed up. You know this better than anyone. There’;s an orange-skinned quasidictator putting kids in cages. There are powerful heatwaves ripping across Europe – proper, 37-degree Celsius heatwaves, not the 24-degree ‘summer’ days that Australians often laugh at. Aboriginal andTorres Strait Islander peoples continued to be imprisoned at rates far too high for a group that only makes up 2% of the nation. Prominent rugby players are spurting antiLGBTQIA+ drivel, and Australia recorded its warmest January-March this year. As if all this wasn’t enough, one in every four young people are currently experiencing a mental health condition (you don’t have to be a genius to connect these dots). The state of the world is enough to make me sigh, enough to make me cry – and most significantly, it sometimes feels like enough to defeat me. Why, you ask, am I telling you all this? We know! My god, how could we not know? It’s everywhere, all the time, a world that is often so awful and upsetting and horrifying that there isn’t a literary technique worth deploying to describe it. Not to be crude, but there’s little point in dressing it up – it’s just shit. How do you continue to work for the future when there are so many obstacles in the present, and indeed, often a few in the past as well? How do you wake up, day after day after day, and continue to study or work or protest – it’s especially impressive when you manage all three – with reality weighing on your shoulders and constricting your lungs? How do you keep fighting, keep thriving, even keep surviving when everything seems to be getting worse? Perhaps a more apt question is this – why do you do it? Is it ignorance? Not to go all boomer on you, but maybe the only way young people keep going is by wrapping ourselves up in cotton wool and burying our heads in the sand. The ability to grow might be a byproduct of privilege. After all, everything is a little bit easier when you have a roof over your head, some money in the bank, and the odds stacked against you by society are minimal.

I’m telling you this because you confuse me. Or maybe because you inspire me. I see you, the people who are always grinding, always working, always dreaming, and I wonder how you do it. How do you keep on growing in spite of it all?

14 So yes, maybe a little bit of willful ignorance is required to keep growing. But it’s a fine balance between ignorance and zoning out for the sake of your mental health, and the more mature you are, the better you are at finding it. Don’t stop growing, but make sure you’re growing mindfully. If it’s not solely ignorance that’s allowing you to grow, then is it helplessness? Look at the seemingly impossible challenges faced by the human race. Then look at the complete lack of action, empathy and common sense wielded by world leaders. How could you not feel helpless in the face of that? We’re all just trying to keep our heads above that water. Perhaps this is the secret to continued selfimprovement and maturity – it’s a mask to hide behind. It’s a method of distraction. Helplessness feeds ignorance, it would appear. But surely it can’t just be ignorance and helplessness... right? We’re not all wandering through this life, defeated by a looming, apparently-inevitable fate. So I have to consider this next option – maybe you people who continue to grow just really don’t care. You see the world all but crumbling around you, and you shrug it off. Isn’t it inevitably selfish to continue to study, make money, get promoted, create your future when so many others can’t? What kind of future will that be? But I can’t really believe this is true. You don’t need selfishness in order to grow. So many of the people I am impressed by, my loved ones and role models who refuse to give up despite it all, could never be described as selfish, and I can’t help thinking that this extends to all of you who continue to grow. Maybe you work purely for the sake of others. Maybe you’ve come so far and gone through so much that it would be an injustice to stop now. Maybe you could actually, ironically, do with being a little more selfish – remember, you have to fit your own mask before helping others. So with all this in mind, there’s only one possible reason left for how (and why) you people refuse to let the chaotic world get in the way of your growth. You’re hopeful. t equally, that we’re going to be the last generation to see disproportionate levels of queer homelessness. You see the rising temperatures and the raging racists of twenty-first century Earth, and you know that you have to grow not in spite of them, but because of them. If we weren’t hopeful, even a little bit hopeful, then we wouldn’t keep growing. We could hardly even keep going. I think it’s about time that I let you in on a little hint. This is a letter to those who won’t stop growing – in other words, this is a letter to everyone. If you’re refusing to let the world get you down, this is a letter to you. If you’re owning your mistakes and fixing those of the generations before you, this is a letter to you. If you’re waking up and continuing onwards every day, this is a letter for you. Because while it may not seem like you’re growing, let me tell you this – just surviving another day in this broken world is often an act of growth on its own. So, to those who refuse to stop growing. I see you. I am one of you. And, damn – we are impressive.

Really, I wouldn’t be surprised if within every young adult who’s ever been described as put-together and mature, there’s a raging ocean of ‘oh-god-what-am-I-doing’ complete with undercurrents of ‘ohgod-what-areMaybe you, the people who continue to grow, feel you don’t have another option. What else can you do but work and improve and keep yourself busy? Hopeful that this chaos will soon fade, and optimistic that your work, your growth, will play some role in that.

You’re positive that we’re not going to be the last generation to see snow, and,