It’s a mad mad mad mad world!

Do you remember when you were a kid, when you had that feeling of not being able to wait to grow up. To become an adult? Because we thought grown-ups were way cooler. They had a “job”, didn’t have to go to school and submit assignments, didn’t have model tests, didn’t have public exams! Boy, I remember how much I just wanted that phase to get over because I thought I was finally going to be done with all the tests in life. Little did I know that I was just getting started!

With every passing day, I realise what an important and difficult phase the 20s-30s is. Suddenly we are expected to take all of life’s most important decisions in such a short while, which would probably determine the path of the rest of our lives. We need to decide, very carefully (and of course, first time right is expected here), what’s going to be our career, our identity, our life partner, our friends that will probably come for life…all this while trying to understand why our metabolism suddenly has reduced, how to stay fit while juggling office and home and trying to change eating habits (such as stress eating/not eating, how to avoid the tempting junk now that you have money, to name a few). It seems more like a gamble. Childhood was a much simpler time, especially because someone else was entrusted with most of the decision-making!

It has made me wonder, what did we really learn in school? What is our syllabus really framed around? I know learning the area of a rectangle is important if I choose to become an engineer, and understanding cell biology will come in handy if I choose to specialise in that, but what are the things we all will have in common growing up, irrespective of whether we are engineers or astronauts, or even chartered accountants?

Life changing decisions like how to know the difference between attraction and love, choosing a life partner, handling rejection (whether at love or at a job), handling relationships successfully, sex education, the importance of consent, depression, suicidal thoughts, experiences on dealing with death and losses, understanding different sexual orientation, gender crisis, and the next batch of decisions about personal finances, knowing how to do basic taxes, to grow vegetables at home, and even everyday problems like what to do when your vehicle breaks down, when there is a fuse in the bulb at home, minimal first aid, CPR…I can go on. The one thing I can say for sure is, almost all of us would go through all of these phases, but no one warned us about all this, right? Did anyone teach us, say, that when you enter your adolescence, your body and mind are going to tell you a lot of confusing things and oh, it’s normal?

No. We live in the era when our biology teachers skip chapters on reproduction system and menstruation because they are too “embarrassed” to teach it in a co-ed class. The stigma associated with love and relationships is very childish and ironic, especially because it’s guaranteed that all of us will go through it, and yet, no parent or teacher is willing to talk about it.

I know that some things are best learnt when experienced, and that there is no right and wrong manual to handle, for instance, depression. But it would surely help to listen to some personal experiences on how someone overcame it, so that it would have taught us that it is at least normal to go through these things.

If any teacher or parent is reading this, a suggestion or request would be talk to the young kids about all these “awkward topics” as a step to reduce the awkwardness prevalent around them. If you don’t, it’s anyway going to hit them full on at some point, and if you share your experiences and concerns and let them know it’s okay and that it’s part of growing up, it would be very instrumental in shaping their perspective and help in all of their decisions as mentioned above.