Forever young

>> Sharon Hyman looks into why some
people don’t grow up in Neverbloomers

ADULT-AVERSE: Hyman

by MATTHEW HAYS

Filmmaker Sharon Hyman says it’s fitting that a film like Neverbloomers has taken so long to come to fruition. It is a documentary, after all, about people who never feel properly grown up.

It was almost a decade ago when Hyman was first struck with the idea for the project. “I was talking with a friend who had been living at home with his parents for many years,” she recalls. “Suddenly, he had a romance with a woman and was soon living with her. In a very short time, he had a relationship, a kid and a mortgage. He was in his early 40s, but had no sense of how to be a grown-up.”

The idea of people who never bloom had a strong, personal connection for Hyman. “I feel like the neverbloomer poster child: never married, no children, still living in the same apartment for 25 years, still taking the same bus. I don’t even have a driver’s licence! And here I was, about to turn 40. And I came from a very traditional upbringing, raised in an Orthodox Jewish household.”

This raised a lot of questions for Hyman, and as she asked around, she found that many people of her generation never felt entirely grown up. With none of the guarantees of cradle-to-grave employment and with people getting married and having children much, much later—or not at all—the defining lines of adulthood were now stretched out, or removed altogether. “I always wondered, if I had the external trappings of grown-up-hood, would that make me feel like more of a grown-up?”

This would lead Hyman to interview a broad range of people about their experiences of (not) growing up, of feeling like an inner child even when things were changing for them externally. Hyman developed a quiz on her Web site so people could see if they were also neverbloomers (take it at www.sharonfilms.com/quiz.html). “The response was incredible,” she reports. “A lot of people told me they feel like they’ve never grown up.”

Hyman says neverbloomers often “walk around like impostor grown-ups, thinking the other person has it so together, when the truth is, no one does.” In a sense, she says, “It’s liberating to know that we all share the same fears and insecurities—we’re all looking for our inner adults.”

Hyman is in the editing process right now, and hopes to launch the film on the festival circuit during the summer.