Young Adulthood
Some Truth about Young Adulthood
We still refer to ourselves as “kids,” but we don’t like to be treated like one. We are, in many ways, free to do what we want, but we may, understandably, be financially supported. If we’re being floated financially, then we have to be accountable to who’s paying those bills or we become stunted.
Generally it’s ages 18 to 25. It can cut-out earlier. I would say where people get out of High School, get a union job, move out, get married, start having kids, it happens in a matter of months. It’s not about you anymore, it’s about establishing a life. But if you’re doing the whole college, figure-yourself-out, maybe grad school, Summer internships, travel, start a career type thing, it tends to take longer. Don’t get me wrong, I did the figure-myself-out thing, for sure! It has value. It helps build adults who are ready to contribute real creativity. And there are plenty of serious minded young-adults who put themselves through college, who grow up way faster than I did. There are plenty of them, but the culture veers towards license and self-involvement on the one hand, and years of training on the other.
Where young-adulthood gets toxic is when there’s all the responsibility of an 8th grade Summer and all the freedom of an over 21 driver’s license and somebody else’s credit card. No limits, no obligations. Commonly, the parents are pretty unhappy with themselves. They’ve unwittingly helped create a paradoxically fragile and domineering person who truly believes that if it’s not their way, then they are being oppressed. The way out of this is about creating functional limits, accountability, and challenging your own entitlement.
In many ways, you’re not an adult, fully, until you’re paying your own way. Phone, food, insurance, housing, and the rest of it. Like it or not, we live in a capitalist society. Responsibility starts with who’s paying. If you were born to a trust fund, it can be difficult because the money’s already there. Responsibility is the necessary other side of freedom. But ‘it’s just about money’ is superficial. The real threshold to adulthood is about owning yourself and your way forward.
There are some of us who grew up in horror shows: being burnt by cigarettes, not fed, sexually abused… I’m not talking about those situations. Most of us grew up with some mix of good things and hard things. It’s like we were dealt cards at birth. Some great cards, some bad ones, some OK ones. Adulthood is about accepting the hand we were dealt to do our best to get the cards we need. There was a time when our parents were like gods to us. There was a time when we believed in the tooth fairy. We grew and changed and we came to realize that life is less black and white, and less magical than we first thought. We came to see life was more about shades of gray, situational ethics, and that sometimes you have to make the best move you can knowing it’s going to have its problems too. Unless whomever parented you fits into that other category, they were never gods, nor are they demons now. Don’t invest in feeling so let down, though it’s a normal place to start. There was no magical way they could have been that would have spared you experiencing the difficulty of this time. They are people, they always were. People trying to figure it out. People perhaps caught in their own double-binds and vanities too. Fallible. Human. It’s up to you now. You’re only human too, but you’re beginning. Much of the story is yet to be written. You have learned from what you’ve known. You can make better choices. You can emulate what you’ve seen that works. It will take time to get forward. It doesn’t happen in one move. But you’ll get there if you take responsibility for playing the best way you know how.
