Ready Or Not, The Training Wheels Are Coming Off

Round two of Unpromtped Prompts comes from Ms. Merrell Readman! Read her thoughts on becoming an adult ~ below ~

As a child, it’s almost inevitable that at one point in your life you will find yourself wishing that you were an adult. You know in your heart that when you’re older, everything will be better. You can stay up as late as you want, you don’t have a curfew and you could eat candy for breakfast. And one day, as an adult, you’ll find that all you will want is to get enough sleep so that your under-eye bags can at least be covered with makeup. You won’t have a curfew, but you’ll be home on time anyways because the idea of work the next morning will sit on your chest like a two ton elephant, and you realistically don’t have the metabolism to eat candy for breakfast anymore.

If only they had told me that being an adult was like studying for weeks for your SAT’s only to realize that it was your drivers test that you had the next day…and you haven’t yet learned to drive.

Middle school prepares you for high school and high school prepares you for college, but why does it feel like there’s a Grand Canyon sized gap between college graduation and being genuinely prepared for real life? Suddenly you feel like you’re a child again. You cry all the time, you still need your parents, and you still hold those dreams of “When I grow up…”, only this time, you are grown up and it isn’t a dream anymore and it wasn’t what you hoped for.

Self-doubt infests your brain like ants to a picnic, and you only fall further and further down the rabbit hole the more aware you become of the questions that have yet to be answered. The pit in your stomach doesn’t go away with a kiss on the forehead and a good night’s sleep. Instead, it digs deeper and deeper, burying you inside of it until the weekend comes and you have two glorious days out in the sun until it’s time to return to the depths of reality.

What they don’t tell you about being an adult is that you don’t feel much like an adult at all. That just because the graduation caps have been flung in the air and the job offers have been accepted, you don’t just wake up one day and feel like you make sense in the 9-5 daily grind. They don’t tell you that you feel like you’re playing dress up just convincingly enough that you’re let in on the meetings and the workplace gossip. But you know it’s just a costume and you’re also scared for the day when it doesn’t feel like a costume anymore.

Uncertainty in life is never easy to accept. But for the first 21 years you only get a taste. You wonder where you’ll go to college. You wonder what you’ll major in. You wonder where you’ll live. But then you graduate and instead of getting a taste, you’re force-fed the entire bottle. Everything is uncertain. And although it can be exciting and new and maybe, if you’re particularly well adjusted, you’re even having fun, you start to realize that even college was a set of training wheels and those wheels are long gone. As someone that enjoys making lists for the pure joy of crossing things off, it sometimes feels as though the list of questions or tasks or expenses to pay off will never end.

I’ve heard “it gets better”, and while the advice was almost certainly not meant about adulthood, you can find me clinging to that metaphorical life raft until I hopefully soon float to shore.