JONTILLMAN.COM | Part of the problem since 1976

There is a period in everyone’s childhood when we begin to look for the notice and approval of some older, adult person. We want them to be impressed by us, to see the seriousness and validity of ourselves and our thoughts, and to engage us as adults. Most of our adolescence is spent thinking of, at least subconsciously, this ideal adult.

Almost all of us misapprehend who exactly this adult is. We focus on a parent or a neighbor or a priest or deacon or whomever. We expend a great deal of energy trying to force our knowledge of that person into the mold we have created; into the skin of our ideal adult. It does not become obvious to us until much later (if ever) that none of those surrogates were actually the ideal adult we wanted approval and serious consideration from.

Perhaps then it is ourselves that we were looking for without knowing it. Perhaps those adolescent longings for the perfect adult, the perfect parent, were the first inklings in our young minds of the people we wished to become. If so, we owe it to ourselves, and presumably to our children, to spare no effort in reflecting back on that ideal adult that we conjured as a child and check our progress against that ideal.

We sought the recognition and love of a then mythical figure, a person that did not yet exist because we had not yet grown to become them. We must then ask ourselves if we now have that love and recognition. Are we the person that we wanted so wholeheartedly as children to exist? Are we even close?