The Real Work of Growing Up is Letting Go

Have you ever stopped to notice that becoming an adult isn’t really about gaining new knowledge but about unlearning the old? Everything you were shown, everything passed down to you by the people who raised you, everything absorbed from the world you grew up in: at some point, you start holding it up to the light and asking, does this actually fit who I am?

That’s not a complaint toward the people who shaped you. They gave you what they had. What they knew. What they genuinely believed was best for you. And maybe a lot of it was. But some of it belonged to their lives, not yours and the longer you carry it, the more it starts to feel foreign and quite heavy.

Some of those old beliefs no longer serve you. They feel different because it's not their life you're trying to live. It's yours.

Growing up means developing the self-awareness to recognize the difference. And once you do, you have a real question to ask yourself, if you are brave enough: what do you do with patterns that no longer belong to you?

The answer, as uncomfortable as it is, is this: you have to break the cycle. And to break the cycle, you have to unlearn. And unlearning doesn’t happen by willpower or an easy decision. No, it only happens when you’re willing to go through it and to heal. To process and to allow yourself to move forward in a new way, even when the old way is all you’ve ever known.

Let’s Talk About Money

Think about how you learned to relate to money. Maybe someone in your household treated it like a source of shame, having too much or too little both were carrying their own kind of stigma. Maybe you watched credit cards treated with fear or recklessness. Maybe no one taught you at all, and you grew into adulthood filling in the blanks yourself, sometimes badly. The patterns we inherit around finances run deep, and most of us don’t even realize we have them until we’re already living out the consequences. We start to carry old money stories that weren’t even ours to begin with.

Relationships

The same is true for love & relationships. We grow up watching the relationships around us whether it be our parents, relatives, the couples on our favourite TV shows and we absorb what we see as a template. We carry it into our own relationships, trying to recreate something that looked good from the outside. But we never saw the inside. We never knew what was spoken quietly, what was held back, what was working and what wasn’t. So when we finally have a relationship of our own, we’re working from an incomplete picture and left wondering why it doesn’t quite look the way we imagined.

Communication

And then there’s the way we were taught to communicate or not taught. This one is probably the hardest because most of us are stuck in the same behaviours as we had when we were children. The temper tantrums, avoidance, silent treatments and blame. Maybe you grew up in a home where emotions were managed through silence, or where conflict always escalated, or where certain things simply weren’t spoken aloud. You internalized that as the way things are done. And it can take years to realize that it wasn’t the only way. That there were healthier patterns available, you just never had a chance to see them modeled. So its up to you to do better. I know for me, in my own life, yelling is a no for me in any relationship and so is disrespect. I believe you can still have arguments and conflicts with the people you love, or the ones in your life in a respectful way, where you aren’t angry at one another but at the problem your facing.

To unlearn is not to erase where you came from. It's to decide, consciously and gently, who you want to become and who you don’t.

The work of unlearning isn’t loud. It’s quiet and slow. It’s noticing a reaction in yourself and tracing it back to where it came from. It’s being willing to sit with discomfort long enough to understand it. It’s giving yourself permission to live differently than you were shown not out of rejection, but out of growth.

You don’t have to carry everything you were given.

Some of it was never meant for you in the first place.

What can you quietly pack up and leave on the curb?