Aging & Wisdom Quote by E. E. Cummings

Cummings frames adulthood not as a finish line but as a jailbreak. The provocation in "It takes courage" is that growing up is usually sold as inevitable, even automatic: you age, you mature, you settle. He flips that script. In his hands, "grow up" becomes an act of will, not biology, and "courage" hints at an adversary. The enemy is not childhood itself but the social machinery that defines maturity as obedience: pick a lane, smooth your edges, be legible.

The phrase "become who you really are" carries a distinctly Cummings tension between essence and performance. There's a romantic confidence that a "real" self exists, but the surrounding verbs are strenuous: you have to become it, implying the authentic self is not discovered like a lost wallet but built under pressure. The subtext is that the world is constantly offering you a cheaper identity - roles, respectability, cynicism dressed up as realism - and calling that adulthood. Refusing those bargains costs you comfort, belonging, sometimes even love.

Context matters: Cummings wrote in a modernist era allergic to Victorian propriety and scarred by mechanized war. His poetry made a career out of resisting the standardized voice - shattered syntax, playful typography, the insistence that feeling can be an argument. This line reads like that project distilled into self-help form, but with teeth. It suggests the bravest thing you can do isn't to harden; it's to stay weird on purpose.