Who is that?

I'll be 21 in August. Every morning when I look at my unedited reflection I acknowledge that what I'm seeing is me, but a part of myself feels a sense of detachment from that image. I still want to wake up each morning and see a bright-eyed kid, unknowing and uncaring of what lies ahead, but optimistic all the same.

It certainly crept up on me. I have been scaffolding time and experiences for these past 20-some years and now I find myself on the precipice of transitioning into adulthood. Human development terms would classify me as an "emerging adult" or a "developed youth", but what is an adult anyway? It does not seem like something we can circumscribe into written word so easily.

I have made mistakes and learned, expanded my knowledge, gained more experiences, tended to my cognitive abilities, and yet... does that really make people more "mature"? Sometimes when I watch adults the thought strikes me that we may never really leave that murky period that succeeds adolescence. Some people are still caught up in adolescence, others linger in the aftermath, and some reject the past in its entirety and take on what has been defined as a mature mindset.

We may stop growing physically - in fact, we do the opposite and start deteriorating slowly at some point - but our minds are doing the same thing they always were. Analyzing, reevaluating, feeling, sensing, trashing the bad and storing the good, accommodating, changing.

So what does growing older and more mature entail?

What does it mean to be an adult?

I can hear the Tootsie Pop owl in my head, a voice from a retro-commercial piping in that the world may never know.