When I was a kid, adults looked like they had a whole operating system running in the background that I just did not have access to yet. They made decisions. They drove cars without narrating out loud what each pedal did. They bought groceries with apparent intent. They knew things. They handled things. And somewhere deep in my small brain I filed away this understanding that one day, probably around the same time I stopped needing someone to sign my permission slips, I would also receive that operating system. Like a software update that just downloads overnight and you wake up and boom. You are a functional person who knows what to do with a RRSP and does not panic when someone asks what you want for your birthday.
I am here to report that the update never came. In fact…I missed the train, the boat and the ship that left the planet long ago.
Or maybe it came and it was just completely corrupted on arrival and nobody told me to check my spam folder. Either way, I am standing here in what is objectively adulthood, with what are objectively adult-level problems and adult-level responsibilities, and I am still just kind of winging it on a daily basis and hoping nobody notices the loading screen still running behind my eyes because although my biological age has surpassed that of the Triassic era, my body feeling that of an elderly at a sock hop and my mind with a personality still stuck where Rainbow Brite and Strawberry shortcake live.
And I know I’m not alone in this. I know that because when I say it out loud to other humans who are also technically adults, they all do the same thing. They exhale. They laugh a little too loudly. They say “like, oh my gosh, same.” Because we have this shared secret that nobody really talks about which is that adulthood is mostly just childhood with better vocabulary and a higher tolerance for disappointment.
So let’s talk about it. The things I was genuinely, sincerely, earnestly convinced adulthood would have answered by now.
Money…*face slap* Was Supposed To Make Sense
Right. I don’t mean I thought I would be rich (keep dreaming). I had modest expectations. I just thought I would… understand it. Like, I would look at my financial situation and it would feel coherent. There would be a plan. The plan would be working. I would look at a budget spreadsheet and feel competent and calm rather than like I am trying to read sheet music in a language I do not speak while someone plays the piano faster and faster. Sorry but I have dyscalculia.
I thought by now I would know what things cost and feel okay about paying for them. I thought I would have figured out the line between “…is this a responsible purchase” and or “…is this a feelings purchase dressed up in sensible clothing with fluffy things.” I thought I’d stop doing math at the grocery store with my face and just… put things in the cart like a person. (Say that to the cartons of eggnog and mallows at Christmas time).
Instead, money remains this shifting, confusing, slightly terrifying thing that I am always just on the edge of understanding and never quite grasping. I know more than I did. I am better than I was. But the confidence I expected? The feeling of being on top of it? Has not shown up. Might be stuck at customs. I will let you know.
What To Make For Supper…or food in general.
I want to put this one right up front because I feel like we do not talk about it enough and it deserves its moment.
I thought adulthood would mean I had a repertoire. A rotation. Meals I just made because they were my meals. I would be the person who opens the fridge and sees a cohesive set of ingredients and thinks “ah yes, Tuesday chicken” and just executes. No existential component. No twenty minute scroll through recipes I do not have the ingredients for. No moment of staring into the fridge like it owes me an apology and then eating toast for the third time this week. Like my ‘Dinner by the Minute‘.
The supper question remains, at this stage in my life, a daily unsolved mystery. I don’t know why this one hits me so personally but it does. It feels like a metaphor for something. I am not sure what. Maybe for the gap between the version of adulthood I imagined and the one I am actually living in. Maybe for the fact that even the small things we expect to become automatic just… do not always. Maybe it is just a meal planning problem and I am projecting. Probably both.
Maybe mainly because out of all the meals I eat, supper is the one I barely recognize anymore.
Hello Cherrios with eggnog!!!
Identity Was Supposed To Settle Down
Here is something nobody warned me about. I thought by a certain age you just kind of knew who you were. Not perfectly. Not rigidly. But in the basic sense of like, you have done enough living that you have a self with shape to it. Firm edges. A recognizable outline. You would meet yourself in the mirror and not feel like a stranger or a work in progress or someone who just respawned and is still figuring out which direction they started facing.
But identity keeps moving. And I do not mean in a bad way necessarily. I mean in the way where I will think I have a really solid understanding of who I am and what I care about and what my deal is, and then life will do something and some layer of me that I did not know existed will surface and I will have to incorporate it. Autism does this. Disability does this. Faith does this. Grief does this. You think you are a completed character build and then you pick up a new piece of lore and have to rethink the whole questline.
I am actually more okay with this than I used to be. But it was not what I expected. I expected to arrive somewhere. I am starting to understand that the arriving is not the point. Which is a hard sell when you are exhausted and just want to know what your deal is for five minutes.
Confidence Was Supposed To Have Showed Up By Now
I will be honest. I spent a lot of my younger years watching adults who seemed confident and thinking that was just something that happened to you eventually. You clocked enough years and you stopped second-guessing yourself in rooms. You stopped doing the thing where you say something and then immediately replay it in your brain for the next six hours looking for what you might have gotten wrong. You walked into spaces and felt like you belonged there because you had done the math and the math checked out and you were fine.
And look. I have grown. I am genuinely more confident in who I am and what I believe and what I have to offer than I was ten years ago. That part is real. But the version I imagined, where I would just stop being nervous, stop doubting, stop doing the post-conversation autopsy? That has not materialized. And I am pretty sure at this point it is not coming. What I have instead is the ability to act despite the doubt, which is maybe more useful anyway but is also significantly less comfortable.
Nobody told me confidence was not the absence of fear. Nobody told me it was just fear that you have gotten better at carrying. I would have liked a heads up.
Friendship Was Supposed To Be Easier To Maintain
When you are young, friendship just kind of happens. You are in the same place at the same time repeatedly and proximity does the work. You do not have to schedule friendship. You do not have to protect it. It is just there, ambient, available. You walk down the hall and your friend is there. You are on the same team, in the same class, going to the same thing after school. Friendship is the water and you are just swimming in it.
Adulthood drained the pool. Actually, it drained the ocean.
I knew it would get harder. I did not know it would get this hard. I did not know that keeping friendships alive as an adult would require the same level of deliberate effort as training for something. That it would involve calendars and guilt and long stretches of silence that do not mean anything is wrong but your brain insists on treating like an omen. That you would love people and miss them and still somehow let months slide by because everyone is tired and busy and overwhelmed and the effort required on any given Tuesday to make plans just feels like one more thing.
I miss my people more than I expected to. Not because they are gone. Because life made distance the default and closeness the thing you have to fight for. That was not in the brochure.
I also have to say I didn’t have very many people to begin with either.
Purpose Was Supposed To Be Clearer
I remember thinking that by now I would have a thing. A much more, clear thing. A calling, maybe, or at least a direction that felt solid enough to stop second-guessing. Some people seem to have this and I watch them with the same combination of admiration and bafflement I bring to watching people fold fitted sheets correctly. Like, how. How are you doing that. Show me every step slowly.
Purpose keeps being slippery for me. Not because I do not care about things or have things I love. I do. But the translation between “things I care about” and “the specific shape my life is supposed to take” has always been fuzzy. And I thought adulthood would have sharpened that picture by now. Like the autofocus would eventually kick in and I would see clearly what I was supposed to be doing with the time I have been given.
Instead I operate mostly on a mixture of faith and instinct and momentum and the occasional sense that something I did today actually mattered. That last one is the fuel. When it shows up I try to notice it. “You did a thing today and it mattered to someone.” Okay. Okay, that is enough. Keep going.
Proverbs 3 says to ‘trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding’. Which is beautiful and also slightly annoying when you really, genuinely want to understand what you are supposed to be doing. But I think that is the tension it is describing. The leaning-not. Because leaning on your own understanding is very tempting when your own understanding is all you have access to. Trusting when you can not see the whole picture is not passive. It is actually a lot of work.
Ageing Was Supposed To Be Abstract For Longer
I remember being young enough that “getting older” was a concept that lived comfortably in the future. Distant. Theoretical. Something that happened to people but not to me, not yet, not now. Time was generous and spacious and there was always more of it.
And then at some point without a lot of fanfare time just started moving differently. And not faster, exactly. More like more a bulldozer. I had to start paying attention. The years started landing with more weight (mountain like). Milestone birthdays stopped being fun or even cared about and started being accompanied by an inventory I didn’t ask to take. What did I do with that year. What did I say I would do and did not. What did I think I would have by now. How was it wasted.
And trust me I now live with many regrets and time wasted more than a life “lived”.
Ageing also showed up in my body in ways I wasn’t fully prepared for, and my disability physically, and mentally made that more complicated in ways I’m still muddling through and will not pretend to have figured out. The relationship between my body and time is not what I imagined it would be. I’m learning to have a different conversation with it. Sometimes that goes well. Sometimes I am just cranky about it. Both are real. I’m also starting to understand that eating pounds of bacon when I was younger wasn’t a wise decision either.
Faith Was Supposed To Get Simpler, Or Harder. I Am Not Sure Which.
I think part of me thought that by now faith would either be a settled, uncomplicated thing sitting quietly in the center of my life like a piece of furniture I had stopped bumping into, or it would have collapsed under the weight of all the questions I kept throwing at it. One or the other. Resolution.
Instead faith is this ongoing, alive, occasionally frustrating, deeply sustaining thing that does not sit still. It grows and stretches and sometimes it asks more of me than I feel like I have. It does not simplify. It deepens, which is different. The questions don’t go away, they’re just geting asked from a different place. One where “trusts” are more even while understanding is way less, which is its own kind of strange math.
I’m genuinely grateful for it. Even when it is uncomfortable. Even when I am in a season where it feels more like stubbornness than serenity. I’m glad it did not collapse. I’m glad it kept asking me to grow. I just also thought by now I’d have fewer two in the morning questions for the ceiling. Apparently not. God seems to be fine with the two-am questions. I’ve decided to take that as reassuring.
The Gap Between What I Imagined and What Is Real
Here is the thing about all of this. The gap between the adulthood I imagined and the adulthood I am living is not a gap made of failures. I should be clear about that. I’m not cataloguing my shortcomings because there are A LOT! I’m cataloguing the distance between a childhood fantasy of what being grown up would feel like and the actual texture of the thing itself. Which is messier, funnier, harder and more interesting than the fantasy was. Also because I never had a childhood reality that others would probably take for granted…being a foster child, my view of adulthood was so warped and skewed, I couldn’t figure out how reality even worked.
I thought adulthood would feel like arrival. It mostly feels like one big political or social movement against trivial things. Ongoing, unfinished, sometimes exhausting, often surprising movement. I haven’t arrived at knowing who I am (and I don’t think I ever will), but I know myself better. I have not arrived at financial confidence, but I understand more than I did (Thank you Rachel, for helping what my “demon spawn of an ex caused“. I haven’t arrived at effortless friendship, but the friendships I have are at least as real, strategically now chosen and worth the effort they take. I haven’t arrived at purpose-with-a-capital-P (brb potty break…lol), but I have accumulated enough small moments of mattering that I can string them together into something that feels like direction…just not in a straight fashioned line.
That is not the glossy brochure version. But it is as real as it comes. And at this point in my life I will take honest over glossy every time because honest at least you can work with. Glossy just makes you feel like you are behind on something that was never real to begin with.
I still don’t know what to make for supper though. Most food makes me sick now (literally). If anyone has a rotation that doesn’t require the emotional bandwidth of a therapy session with a horde of capybaras, cute kittens or a mob of xenomorphs assimilated by the Borg, to execute, my inbox is open. I am begging.
The questions always matter. The fumbling definitely. The getting up and trying again even when you thought you would have this figured out by now, well of course!. The faith that keeps showing up even when it is inconvenient matters. The friends you text at weird hours make a huge difference. The grace you give yourself for still being in progress matters.
Adulthood doesn’t come with the answers and it isn’t a rulebook or a guidebook into the mysterious unknown. But it does come with better questions. I am still deciding if that is a fair trade.
Probably it is, or if you want to invite me over for Christmas dinner I’m ok with that too. I need more friends or a reality check…
Nah.
But definitely, ask me again after dinner.