A young girl is starting her first grade at school. For months now, everyone has been telling her how big she is. And she really is big - she is done with kindergarten, and now she is off to school, to the place where the big kids go. Thrilled, she picked out a big-kid-backpack, a big-kid-pencil case, and a big-kid- lunchbox.
She walks through the school gate. The school looks gigantic, especially compared to the kindergarten she was in until just a few weeks ago. The schoolyard is huge. And a group of huge, enormous kids (she's not entirely sure they still count as kids) come charging past her. She grabs her mother's hand tight. She feels smaller than she's ever felt, and just wants to go home, go back to kindergarten, curl up in a fetal position.
This happens at the start of first grade, and it happens at many other major turning points in life. Starting middle school, or high school, or other new chapters later on. In career growth, in a job promotion. It happens sometimes with a move to our very own "dream home" or with emigrating to a new country. And it happens with particular intensity in the transition to parenthood, and in our own passages as parents through our children's milestones.
This is something we go through again and again, and somehow it still manages to catch us off guard every time: those moments when we grow all at once, and at the same time feel smaller than we've ever been.
Parents of babies are familiar with this phenomenon. Growth spurts come with regression, a return to patterns we thought were behind us: the baby who had been sleeping better starts waking again at night, more irritable, more restless, and then after a few days, when they settle, we discover that during that very period they picked up a new skill, physical or cognitive. With older children too, parents can often recognize these "growth spurts" at the start of a school year, or during other transitions when a child becomes "bigger" overnight, while at the same time returning to behaviours they had already outgrown.
In many ways, these growth spurts stay with us throughout our lives. Our development is never linear, and in the very areas where we're growing, gaining new abilities, facing new challenges, understanding something new about ourselves – growing also means sometimes taking a step backward.
But while an infant in a growth spurt, and a girl starting first grade, have a mother or father who can, hopefully, step back and observe, understand what's happening, hold their hand, offer comfort, make sense of the experience – as adults we often have to do some of this for ourselves. To notice for ourselves that things feel harder, that we're more on edge, that we're falling back into old patterns. To remind ourselves that if we suddenly feel smaller than we've ever felt, there's a good chance it's because we've just learned to walk, or moved up a grade.
This is not an easy task at all. As we grow, we do learn to know ourselves better and to understand what is happening to us. But in the very moments when we feel small, and need more than ever the ability to look inward and understand what we are going through, that ability is not always accessible to us. And so we can not always, and do not have to, make it through our growth spurts on our own.
Like the girl at the school gate, who back in kindergarten was already happy to say goodbye to Mom and Dad at the gate and go in on her own, but now needs a hand - in those moments, we need someone else beside us. Someone who can see us when we are not very good at seeing ourselves, and offer us the hand we need.
But there is another difficulty here: when we feel small but are "supposed" to be big, turning to someone else for help is not easy either. Feeling "small" often brings up shame, or a sense of not being good enough, and from that place it becomes harder to reach out to the people around us—as though simply needing someone else makes us even smaller.
And so we can get stuck in a situation where, precisely when we most need our ability to look inward, it is least accessible to us; and precisely when we most need another person's gaze and their outstretched hand, it is hard for us to ask for them—or even to take them when they are offered.
Maybe what can help in these moments is to remember that this is not our first growth spurt. Yes, we have "moved up a grade," and we are now standing in front of something new, something we have never encountered before. But it is not the first time we have stood in front of something new and felt small in its presence.
Maybe we can remember how we made it through the previous growth spurt. Who we were able to turn to for help without feeling diminished by it. How, the last time, we managed to see that it wasn't that we had become smaller, but that what we were facing had become bigger. How we managed to remember that our abilities had not disappeared, even if they were harder for us to see.
And maybe all we will manage to remember is that somehow, even if it is not clear right now how, we have already made it through our previous growth spurts. And afterward, we were able to look back and see how much we had grown.