When Did You Realize You Grew Up?

Time really does fly. While quarantine, I wanted to share with you all a photoshoot we did waaaay back in December. We really don’t realize how quickly we’re evolving and time is passing.

I’m going to start out with a dialogue I had with the team involved in the photoshoot. After that, enjoy reading the responses I’ve received when I asked the question “When did you realize you grew up?”

Do you feel like you’ve grown up?

– A bit.

What changed?

-We have more responsibilities now.

–Life was pitiless.

*We laugh*

-We have unnecessary obligations.

Are they really unnecessary?

-Yes. I think about this often… On a daily basis, I’m obligated to see so many people I don’t want to. I have to see them every day, I can’t see people I love every day.

But wasn’t it like that when you were younger as well? Going to preschool…

–I… liked everyone back then.

Why do you think that was the case?

-As people grow older…

-There’s more diversity.

-Yes. When we’re little kids everyone was more naive, happier. Our only purpose was to play games.

What’s better: diversity or your only purpose to be playing games?

-Games.

-Agreed!

Is it good to stay like that forever?

-Not forever but… maybe we can stay like that for thirty years.

-Greed becomes a factor in our lives. Greed, insincerity…

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I was 9, I dived into a kids pool and cut my chin. That’s when I understood I was too big to swim in the kids pool.

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In the living compound my apartment was in, the security guards called parents whenever kids would leave the premises to check if the kids had permission to do so. Usually during summers, I went to the stationary store with my friends, and the guards would call our parents every time. This would happen multiple times over the summer. One year, on our first trip that summer, the guard told us “you can pass you grew up now” and didn’t call our parents. That day, I felt that I wasn’t a kid anymore.

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Last summer I was biking with one of my friends and we saw a young kid. My friend asked him if he was up for a race. He looked at him and said: “Am I going to race with you, grandpa!” That hurt.

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I never wanted my childhood to end but at the same time, I feel like it ended at a very early age. When my brother was born, I felt responsible for him. With that news sense of responsibility, my childhood ended quicker. Also, the day I started first grade, I gathered all my toys, took them to my mom, and said “I’m grown now, I don’t want to play with toys.”

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I felt like I grew up when I was responsible for the kids in the vacations we took with other families.

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This happened in fourth grade. Until that year, I was the kid that never disobeyed teachers, that colored in the drawings on my homework so it looked nice, that never disrupted class. I was a well-behaved, organized student. I don’t know why but that year our teacher hated me. Towards the end of the year, it was my turn to do the weekly experiment in class. To my luck, I was assigned to do something that I couldn’t understand the purpose of. I had to fill a glass jar with soil and water it at school, In front of all my classmates. After I did what was required, the teacher asked me: “Now, what did we learn from this experiment?” I really couldn’t understand the point of it. Normally I wasn’t a kid who could admit that he didn’t understand, but I confidently said: “I’m sorry, but I really didn’t understand what I was supposed to conclude from this experiment. My teacher’s response was to rebuke: “Of course, when you poured water on the soil, the air gaps in the soil got filled, and the worms got out.” After her response, at that age, I said to myself: “That’s so silly, I’m not going to get sad because of this,” and maybe for the first time in my life I didn’t let someone who had more authority than me to mess with my thoughts and feelings – and instead, I used my logic to prevent myself for getting sad for no reason.

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I realized I had grown when a random woman passing by stopped and said: “Awww, you’re so cute” and I didn’t like it.

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I never thought that my childhood ended completely, I still have a childish energy that bursts through me. But one moment that proved that I had started growing up was in first grade. The kid I liked asked me if I liked him. I said no and anxiously walked away. Even though it’s a small thing, this is the first lie I remember telling and the first moment I realized what my feelings meant, I think this was a sign that I was slowly drifting away from being a child.

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Before first grade started, we had an orientation day to tour the school and meet our classmates. I had a My Little Pony toy with me – I was throwing it up in the air and catching it. A teacher came up to me and said: “You have very nice toys but you can’T bring them here on normal school days.” In that moment I understood that life wasn’T all fun and games.

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I understood that something was changing the first time I felt a sexual attraction towards someone. It was a new world.

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A point in my life when I realized I was really growing up happened around 12 years of age. There was a Nike shirt with pictures of shoes hanging off both sides which I had had for as long as I can remember. I had been wearing for at least 3 years and it was so worn and faded by now from washing that it might as well have been a tattered rag. Despite pressure from my mom to stop wearing it, I refused to have it thrown out. The shirt and I were inseparable, it was practically glued to my body. I wasn’t really sure why but it was my favorite shirt and the only shirt I liked in my wardrobe at the time. Even though I knew I would have to stop wearing it eventually I was taken by surprise one morning when my head would not pass through the neck of the shirt. And as I stubbornly refused to accept it was time to move on I pulled the shirt down even harder and ripped the shirt from the collar down. I obviously wasn’t going to act sentimental enough to sit down and cry over a ripped shirt but it was a significant moment of realization for me when I think back on it. I was still basically a child at the time, on the edge of puberty, but the destruction of my favorite shirt forced me to accept that growing up is a reality and we can’t always hold on to the things we want forever.

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When I asked my mom for coffee and she made me a very nice Turkish coffee for the first time, I understood that my childhood was over. My mom told me my mustache would grow 🙁 (there is a Turkish saying “The mustaches of girls who drink coffee will grow)

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When I understood that this was serious: When I had to be marked as an adult traveler on Turkish Airlines’ website, when my age range in Onedio tests had to be marked as 18-24, when I stopped receiving color pencils and drawings to color in at restaurants…

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I still haven’t grown up.

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Models: Can Geniş, Emre Tertemiz, Sinem Sevinç

Photographers: Emine Taha, Iman Taha