I have a theory. And it is not a particularly original theory, but I think it needs to be said out loud more often, in public, by people who are supposed to have their lives together. Here it is: nobody actually knows what they are doing. Not really. Not fully. Everyone is just moving through the world at varying speeds of confident improvisation, and the ones who look the most certain are usually the most terrified.
I did not come to this conclusion lightly. I came to it the way most people come to uncomfortable truths, slowly, painfully, and usually while doing something extremely mundane like staring at a bill or trying to remember if I already took my vitamins or standing in a grocery store aisle for six full minutes trying to decide between two nearly identical products while a small child stared at me like I was the strangest creature they had ever seen.
That child was not wrong.
The age keeps moving.
When I was little, adults seemed like a completely different species. They drove cars. They made decisions. They drank coffee without making a face. They signed things with actual pens in a way that implied they understood what they were signing. Adulthood looked like a destination, like someplace you arrived at and then stayed. A level you unlocked and never had to grind through again.
I think most of us spent our childhoods assuming there was some specific age where it would all click into place. Like a loading screen that finally resolves. Sixteen felt like it would do it. Then eighteen. Then twenty-one. Then twenty-five, when your prefrontal cortex supposedly finishes developing, which I only know because someone told me that once in a tone that implied it should be comforting and it very much was not. Then thirty. Then thirty-five. And so on down the road, the finish line keeps relocating itself like it is messing with us on purpose.
I am still waiting for the cutscene that plays when you officially become an adult. The one where the music swells and everything makes sense.
It has not played yet. I have serious doubts it is coming.
Let’s talk about bills for a second.
Not specific bills, because honestly I respect my own blood pressure. Just bills as a concept. As an experience. Because nobody prepared me for the emotional weight of bills. Not the actual money part, I mean the psychological part, the part where a piece of paper or an email arrives and your brain, your beautiful chaotic brain, immediately starts doing math it does not want to do in a currency of stress it did not agree to trade in.
And you handle it. Or you figure out how to handle it. Or you ask for help. Or you push it slightly to one side of your brain and deal with it on Friday. However it goes, you navigate it. But here is the thing nobody mentions: navigating something does not automatically make you feel like a competent adult. You can handle very hard things and still feel like you are just a kid in a trench coat doing an impression of someone who has it together.
The responsibilities pile up and you meet them, imperfectly and sometimes late, but you meet them. And still. Still. The feeling of being a fully realized, confident, sorted adult does not necessarily follow. The responsibilities arrived. The feeling has been stuck in customs.
And the goals. Oh, the goals.
Can we talk about how weird it is that your goals are allowed to change? Like, actually allowed. I was not given adequate warning about this. I thought goals were supposed to be chosen young and then pursued with linear dedication until achieved, like a main quest line with no detours. Nobody told me that what I want at twenty-two might be completely different from what I want at thirty-two, and that this is not failure, it is just being a human person who exists in time and changes as they go.
I have wanted completely different things at different points in my life. Things I was certain about. Things I would have argued for with real passion. And then something shifted, inside me or around me or both, and suddenly I was looking at those old certainties like they belonged to someone I used to know. Not with contempt, just with the mild surprise of realizing how much ground you have covered without noticing.
Real adults, I was told implicitly, know what they want. They have five-year plans. They have trajectory. They are pointed at something specific and they are moving toward it in a straight line.
Nobody is moving in a straight line. We are all just taking the path that is in front of us and calling it a plan after the fact. That is not a criticism. That is just how it actually works.
Mistakes are supposed to decrease. Right?
Here is another thing I genuinely believed was part of the deal: adults make fewer mistakes. The older you get, the more wisdom you accumulate, the less you trip over your own feet. Metaphorically. Sometimes literally too but mostly metaphorically.
Wrong. So wrong. You just get better at recognizing what kind of mistake you are making while you are making it, which is both more and less comforting than it sounds. You develop a running commentary. “Oh, this is the part where I overcommit and then burn out.” “This is the part where I get defensive instead of just asking for help.” “This is the part where I make the same choice I swore I would not make again, full speed, eyes open, because apparently I am still working on this one.”
The mistakes do not disappear. You just develop a more sophisticated relationship with them. You learn which ones you can afford to make and which ones cost too much. You learn the difference between a mistake that reveals something true about you and a mistake that just means you were tired and not thinking clearly. You learn to forgive yourself faster, if you are lucky and doing the work. But the mistakes themselves? They are hanging around. They are freeloading. They are showing no signs of leaving.
Which means every adult you have ever respected has also been making mistakes this whole time. Quietly. Consistently. And still showing up.
That is kind of beautiful actually. In a deeply chaotic way.
The creativity thing no one warns you about.
At some point there is this invisible cultural message that gets delivered, not in words exactly, but in atmosphere. A slow accumulation of signals that say: creativity is for when you have free time, and adults do not have free time, and so creativity is something you had when you were young and irresponsible and did not have enough Real Things to worry about.
I refuse this. I have refused it consistently and without apology. But I want to name it because I know I am not the only one who felt it pressing down. The idea that at a certain age you are supposed to trade in the parts of yourself that make things and dream things and play with ideas, and pick up something practical and sensible and grey instead.
Some of the most adult moments I have ever had were inside creative work. The discipline of finishing something when you do not feel like it. The humility of learning that the thing you made is not as good as you wanted it to be and making it again anyway. The courage of putting something you made into the world and letting people respond to it. That is not childish. That is deeply adult. It is just not the version of adult we were sold.
I think a lot of people quietly abandoned things they loved because they thought growing up required it. And I grieve that. Not in a dramatic way, just in a small, steady way that lives in the background when I watch someone say “oh, I used to paint” or “I used to write” like it is a past life they closed the door on.
You can open it back up. The door does not lock from the outside.
Everyone is improvising. I have proof.
My proof is mostly anecdotal and completely unscientific and I stand by it entirely. It is this: every adult I have ever gotten close enough to see clearly has had a moment where the mask slipped and what was underneath was just a person, improvising, hoping they were getting it roughly right, carrying old wounds they were still figuring out how to carry, and doing their best with what they had available.
Every single one.
Not in a sad way, in a fundamentally human way. The people I respect the most in my life are not the people who seem the most certain. They are the people who are willing to say “I am not sure, let me think about that” and “I got that wrong and I am sorry” and “I am still working on this, honestly.” That is not weakness. That is the most adult thing I can think of.
Proverbs talks a lot about wisdom, and it describes it as something you pursue, something you walk toward your whole life, not something you arrive at and then possess forever. That framing makes a lot more sense to me than the cultural version of adulthood where you hit a number on the calendar and suddenly transform into someone who is done becoming. Nobody is done becoming. That is the whole point. That is what being alive is.
So when does it happen?
I genuinely think the feeling of being an adult is not a destination. It is more like a frequency that comes in and out depending on circumstances. Some days I feel completely capable and grounded and like I understand my life. Some days I feel like I am playing a video game on a difficulty setting I did not select and the controls are unresponsive and no one gave me the guide.
Both of those are real. Both of those are adulthood.
I think the moment most people actually become adults is not a birthday and not a milestone. It is quieter than that. It is the moment you stop waiting for the feeling and just start doing the thing anyway. When you handle the bill not because you feel equipped but because it needs handling. When you make the hard call not because you feel wise but because someone needs you to be the person who makes it. When you sit with your own uncertainty and do not demand that it resolve before you can move.
That is it. That is the whole trick. You just keep going while you are still figuring it out. You are allowed to not have it together. You are allowed to change your mind, change your goals, change your whole understanding of what you are doing and why. You are allowed to make mistakes and correct them and make new ones and learn those too.
You are allowed to be in process. That is not a failure state. That is the state.
The loading screen does not resolve. The cutscene does not play. There is no level where you stop being someone who is figuring it out and start being someone who has figured it out.
And honestly? I think I am finally, slowly, okay with that.
Mostly.
Ask me again on a bill day.
