It turns out being an adult isn’t any of the things I imagined during my prolonged and protracted adolescence. I thought of it as a long, slow slide into boringness and complacency, a death of whimsy and dreaming. Frankly, I declared with pride that I would never grow up.
I never imagined there could ever be anything positive about it, and sometimes it’s No Goddamned Fun At All, but it’s not without it’s satisfactions and honor—and even puckish moments. True, those are often few and far between. Dreams have to be put on hold or parsed into small, bite-sized increments because there isn’t the energy for much else. It means taking those disappointments on the chin because there isn’t room enough to be the hurt child or the mopey kid. Life demands that we do what must be done. Often being an adult means doing the things that nobody wants to do because somebody’s got to do them, and the bottle spins around to empty space after empty space until it reaches you, the only one left. It means that procrastination will have to wait because there’s no time for it, and that hard decisions have to be made because . . . there’s no choice, really.
It also means that you get closer to your authentic self than you’ve ever been, the real grit at the bottom of the barrel. I loved my years of playing, my extenuated puberty. I hope to get back to some form of it someday—although I know that some doors, once passed through, cannot be exited through again. You’re no longer the same person who first crossed the threshold. You might reverse and try to go back the way you came, but the world you step into will not be the one you left. You can’t go home again. I understand that now. The undiscovere’d country, from whose bourn no traveller returns…
I expect that everyone’s pathway to adulthood is different, nuanced in varieties of ways, and some people never make it there no matter how old they get. For some, adulthood is as much an undiscovered country as death. For all of us, it is the eternal way forward, no turning back. The discovery of what it means to be human, what it means to take responsibility for your actions, and . . . for the things and people you love who need you, finally, to be the grown up.
