Arrested Development

I used to think growing up was something you did once. Turns out, parts of us only grow when we are ready to face what kept them stuck. This is what it looked like when I finally did.

I’m forty-eight years old. I got married at twenty-six, had my first son at twenty-eight, my second at twenty-nine, and my sweet little guy at forty-one. I earned my Ph.D. at thirty and started my private practice at thirty-four. I’d owned two homes by that same age. On paper I looked like a woman who’d grown up on time, maybe even a little ahead of schedule. But here’s the truth you couldn’t see: I didn’t actually start growing up until I was forty-four.

Forty-four was the year I finally decided to look at the parts of myself I’d kept hidden for decades. I learned early to suppress my own needs so I could care for everyone around me. I became the quintessential good girl because I thought it kept me safe. Maybe for a while it did. But by sixteen that role took a toll, and I developed anorexia, the ultimate good girl illness. I’d denied myself so completely that I convinced myself I didn’t even have basic needs. That’s when my development stalled.

I grew older, but I didn’t grow up. I built a career, I fell in love, I had children, and I created a life that looked solid from the outside. Inside, I was still organized around the need to avoid my own feelings. I shaped my identity around the eating disorder because it protected me from the emotions I was afraid to acknowledge, let alone express. I grew in some ways, of course, but the growth was uneven. In many areas of my inner life, I was adult-like, but really, I was a little girl and her angry adolescent protector performing an impressive imitation of adulthood. Everything about me looked mature, yet essential parts of me had stopped developing when I was sixteen.

I didn’t have language for any of this at the time. I only knew that something in me felt out of sync with the life I was living. Then, in my early adulthood, I found an unexpected mirror in a show I happened to love: Arrested Development. On the surface it was a silly sitcom about a dysfunctional family, but underneath the jokes it was a story about emotional growth that never happened. The characters looked like adults, talked like adults, and lived in adult bodies, but each one was stuck in the age when life had overwhelmed them. They repeated the same patterns because they’d never learned anything new. They acted out old roles because they hadn’t yet developed the internal capacity to do anything else.

I watched that show for years without recognizing myself in the Bluth family, but my body knew. Something in me was drawn to those characters even if I couldn’t name why. Only much later did I understand that I’d been doing the same thing they were doing, only my version was far less funny. I’d been living inside a self-made holding cell. I’d been acting like a grown-up without ever feeling like one. That recognition didn’t come until I was forty-four, after traumatic loss and my son’s emotional collapse finally gave me the perspective I needed to stop performing and start paying attention.

In the years since, with a lot of support, I’ve started to look at the patterns that kept me stuck. I didn’t decide to eat more or exercise less. The choice I made was far deeper and far more difficult. I chose to understand why restriction had become the place I felt most in control. I chose to face the feelings I’d spent years trying to outrun. I chose honesty over perfection and vulnerability over image. Those choices were the beginning of my real growth.

During a recent session with my therapist, I wondered out loud why I keep writing about my eating disorder, even though I rely on it less and less. It feels important, but it also feels repetitive, like I’m circling the same ideas again. She paused for a moment and then told me something that landed in my body before it landed in my mind. She said, “You’ve been holding in a lot for a lot of years.” When I heard that, I realized that revisiting these stories isn’t a sign of being stuck. It’s a sign of growing. I’m returning to the years I refused to look at. The blinders are finally off, and there’s a lot to process before I can catch up to myself.

The truth is, we all have old wounds waiting quietly for us to turn toward them. They may not look the same, and they may not come with the same storyline, but everyone carries places where development paused because life got too overwhelming. The work of adulthood is learning how to tend to those younger parts with honesty instead of avoidance.

Doing this work has taught me that growing up is less about milestones and more about courage. It’s the courage to look inward, the courage to stop pretending, and the courage to let yourself be seen. Most of us reach a point when we realize the emotional work we avoided is still waiting for us, patient and unmoved. Fortunately, it turns out you can grow up at any age.