Do Adults Actually Feel like Adults?
This question floated into my thought stream while driving the most banal stretch of land from Dallas to Austin yesterday (I actually think that hell bares some resemblance to I-35). I left a 24-hour stint in Dallas visiting friends I knew far before I knew anything about the word “adulting”. Over dinner the night before, we talked as though we were adults, ruminating over the current social climate and how our jobs in our respective fields felt important. We used all of the right words. Our HR departments would be so proud. But, we also talked about farting during workout classes and the profound injustice of a two-year hiatus of Big Little Lies on HBO. We spent too long recounting old break-ups from our tweenhood and laughing about the new bras we just bought and our favorite newfound hobbies. I teetered back-and-forth between feeling 9 and feeling 50. I spent 24 hours in a state of contradicting my present reality with the fading familiarity of my youth.
As I reflected on those conversations, I couldn’t help but wonder, in all of this Carrie Bradshaw glow: Are we all kidding ourselves by thinking its a linear process of diploma, career, marriage, house, kids, grandkids, and the inevitable (BUT NECESSARY, thank you modern healthcare) oxygen tank? Is it age that designates the title, or the assumption of responsibilities?
Within that dinner conversation, it felt like we had been given a new training manual for our twenties, with a new vocabulary and dress code, for the next chapter(s) in our lives. Could my friends hear the same shift I heard in our conversations? Just 3 years ago, you probably would have caught me sitting at a light on my bike in College Station, twenty minutes late to class, trying to find a way to get my friends to go out dancing on Northgate (shoutout Cstat!). I barely remember my day-to-day college life anymore. I didn’t even have a regular coffee order! Now, I’m flippantly bringing up the Department of Justice in conversation and talking about upcoming baby showers and trying to budget my finances. What have I become?
Looking back, I bet I have pretended to be an adult since my junior year of college. I applied for ~internships~ and bolstered my resumé and learned how to add a signature to all of my emails. WATCH OUT WORLD. But I will still, without hesitation, be the first person to let my mom buy my clothes and cringe at any car payments and live off the office supply of snacks in lieu of grocery shopping. Aren’t there guidelines adults have to adhere to in order to be qualified to carry the gravitas of that word? I’m 25! How do people know when they’re fully-fledged adults? Do any of us even want to be adults?!
Since my time in college, I’ve “grown up”. As an “adult”, I go to counseling and I throw ceramics occasionally and I bake bread, all for the sake of FUN. I’ve worked in public policy on and off over the last three years. My line of work makes me feel like what I am contributing to is important. You probably know how it feels. Boring, but good. I feel I have a greater purpose working in public policy simply beyond myself, but I still sometimes feel like I see this world through the eyes of an 8-year-old. It’s as though I’ve tricked enough people into thinking that I can comfortably walk in pencil skirts and speak on issues that, in reality, I can hardly grasp. I will attempt the hell out of telling you why and how the school finance system in Texas is broken. But didn’t I just leave that very system? Honestly, how did I get into this desk, and who gave me access to this computer?
Before I let this soapbox get too meta, let me stop and say that I loooooove pretending to be an adult. It is wildly cool and not blasé at all to sit at the table (Sheryl Sandberg the shit out of it while you’re there!) and have important conversations and see that change is happening around you. Twenty-somethings need to be in these places and filling these corners of boardrooms and press events and town halls. I just think that we’re simultaneously kidding ourselves if we don’t see that, maybe even with car seats and mortgages and promotions, we are still those kids who want to run through a sprinkler head and eat an entire cake face-first.
In theory, I think I’d like to think that I am an adult. The federal government addresses me as an adult and assumes that I have my shit figured out. The phrase “fake it til you make it” feels like my MF mantra most of the time. I think we would all like to be adults. But in that same breath, I can recognize how casually I use acronyms like MF and LMAO in conversation, how rarely I will refer to someone as a “man” or “woman” and instead use “guy” or “girl” to address anyone that doesn’t have grey hair, and how slow I am to commit to absolutely anything permanent in my life. I just want to be, and have that be enough.
Simply put, I think we should recognize that the 8-year-old in us isn’t finished playing hopscotch outside (I clearly had an exhilarating childhood), and that they probably would like for the 25-year-old to join in on a round or two. Hang out with that kid from your childhood. Sit at the kiddie table. Smash cake in your face and run through that damn sprinkler, girl.
