I haven’t figured out life yet. In fact, I probably never will. And, if Liberal Arts was right, ‘Nobody feels like an adult. It’s the world’s dirtiest secret.’ Yet I have spent a lot of time in the last couple of months thinking about the moment when one becomes an adult. It started with a deeper understanding of the scariest thought there is – that I am completely and utterly alone. Ah, but by all means, I am not ungrateful at all. If anything, I am so much more aware of how incredibly important my loved ones are, how little of what I am I’d be without their support, and how stupidly lucky I am to have such a fantastic circle around me – a circle that lovingly pumps me up from so many different places I get to call home today. People really can make or break you, and my people make me better every single day. I have no doubts about that.
But I also realised that I do belong only to myself at the end of the day. Motivational propaganda’s entire aim might be to make this clearer to us, but it’s so different when you feel it, when it comes from within, from the place where all of your truths come from. I’ve been through a rough patch and while people have gone out their ways to help me overcome it all, the loneliness hasn’t left my bones yet. Once it hits you this hard, it probably never really does. But somehow, it’s a filling, wholesome kind of loneliness to realise that, well, you’re you now. What’s outside can’t fill the voids inside anymore, it can only hold your hand and make it easier for you to do it for yourself. But nothing and nobody can do it for you, because you’ve just become – or just realised you’ve become – completely, utterly, deeply you.
Hence, here’s what I know to be true today: you become an adult the day you realise that nobody knows any better than you. Family, friends and gods might all be just as wrong as you might be. And it’s terribly disturbing to suddenly think of the people you’ve always looked up to as slightly different versions of you, with question marks and unfinished businesses and recurring thoughts and shrugs and needs and regrets you thought only belonged to you. But they carry the same mountains as you, mountains we were only supposed to climb. Such is life – we live, we learn, we rarely let go.
You become an adult when you realise that not even the adult-est adult you know possesses all the answers you need, and therefore not only there’s no one to run to, but also the wisdom your child self somehow plastered across your parents’ and teachers’ and twenty-something-cousins’ faces is unattainable. All there is to do is pick up bits and pieces from everyone you cross paths with and build your very own unique Answer House. There are no two identical ones in the world, and no templates to start building yours the right way. There is no right way. There are no two people who view life in the same way. There is no state of adult-enlightenment to reach. Don’t let me, or anybody else for that matter, fool you. We’re all guessing here.
You become an adult when you realise there is no such thing as suddenly having become an adult. You simply are, and so are the rest, and you can stop being afraid of authority, ladders, and monsters under the bed or in the office. The monsters are just as clueless as you. In my book so far, you become an adult when you realise we’re all in this together, helping one another, belonging to ourselves, second guessing everything but fighting our battles nevertheless. Every now and then some will look up to us and we will look up to others, but overall we’re all just as good as each other.
Something on your mind?