Loss Begets Growth

How Loss Shapes Who We Become

When do we become adults? Is it when we turn 18, get our first job, or move out of our parents’ house? These are the usual milestones. Lately, I’ve been wondering if adulthood only truly begins after we start losing intangible things, rather than gaining accolades and physical things.Recently, my Little from Big Brothers Big Sisters turned fourteen and just started his first job. I'm very proud of him and he is excited to start earning his own money. What struck me most, though, was the realization that his time wasn’t fully his anymore. A small but real shift had begun, drawing a line between carefree childhood and growing, unavoidable responsibility. He is entering young adulthood, and the price of entry, as it often is, is time.Time is one of the first things that we sacrifice. As kids, our hours are elastic. Endless summers at the pool, aimless afternoons exploring the woods, the kind of slow boredom that now feels like a luxury. Trading hours for a paycheck marks a shift where structure and reward enter, but time slips away. What we gain in independence, we often lose in innocence.And then there is love. Your first real love is so often tied to your first real heartbreak. The kind that wakes you up in the middle of the night or hits you like a wave during an otherwise normal day. There’s a version of you before heartbreak, before you know what it means to love someone deeply and lose them. And there’s a version of you after. The latter is older and wiser, hardened from experiencing loss.Only once you lose something or someone that you love do you understand the balance in the world. We grow upwards after each trying time and after every heartbreak, but along the upward spiral there are highs and lows. Experiencing loss elevates us through allowing us a new perspective on how good we may have had it. We are looking through a window into our past selves, seeing how we’ve grown.Loss sinks into us. It reshapes the way we see the world. The death of a loved one, the passing of a grandparent, a mentor, or even a pet, each one pulls back the curtain on life’s fragility. When you’re young, the people you love feel permanent. Their presence is woven into the background of your life. And then, one day, they’re not. That absence often creates a void, that I’ve learned you are supposed to fill with gratitude. Gratitude for having had that someone in your life and having experienced life in their presence.Even friendships can drift. People grow apart. Paths diverge. Sometimes it’s a slow fade. Other times, it’s a sudden goodbye. No matter how, the loss is real and with each goodbye, we become more aware of how little in life is guaranteed to stay.Maybe adulthood isn’t something you wake up into. Maybe it’s a slow erosion of our childhood shells, and what is left is our adult selves. A quiet process of handing over things you never realized were temporary until they were gone.Each loss, as painful as they are, gives shape to who we become. They teach us how to endure, how to care more intentionally, how to hold things loosely but love them fiercely while we have them.We become adults not when we gain everything, but when we learn how to live meaningfully after losing something we thought we couldn’t live without.