What does is it mean to be an Adult
I like to define adulthood as a phase in one’s life of gaining control of the power to make decisions about your life and most importantly being responsible for the consequences of your decisions, sometimes it may mean being responsible for the decisions others have made.
It’s a point where we start building ourselves and the life, we want for ourselves. However blissful the imagination of adulthood maybe, it has a lot of unexpected turns and strange pop ups and here is why the transition from adolescence to adulthood is especially challenging.
We are comfortable
When we are young and we are under the order and the protection of the life that our parents have given us, we don’t anticipate that one day we would have to call shots on our own lives. To the most fortunate of us who have a parent or guardian who have devoted a huge chunk of their lives to loving and protecting us we never quite exactly know when to stand up on our feet.
From birth to our early 20s we are probably still living at home, we don’t know what it takes to create a life for ourselves, what it takes to decide how you will spend your time on earth, we don’t know what it will take for us to sustain the beautiful naïve dreams we have as kids.
Nothing is wrong with being loved and protected, its just that we get so comfortable, and we don’t get prepared for our own Journeys as adults
We Are Not Intentional
When we are younger, we are bit more impulsive in our decisions, we jump into relations, we jump into having children, we jump in and out of friendships, we are in continuous motion of hoping from one thing into the next.
While it may not necessarily be a horrible thing to keep busy, it is more advisable to take your time to calculate your moves. Think on what you want to do next, what needs to be put together to achieve it. Be intentional with your movements, know why you choose to do things.
Don’t just Jump into it because your mother upset you or that your friends are doing it. Don’t do things because generations past have done it, ask yourself, why that girl? Why Christianity? Why Hinduism? Why alcohol? Why drugs? There are a lot of people who have chosen to be divergent in their families just because they could, yet there is yet still a multitude that never questioned anything.
Essentially, we struggle because we don’t take time to be intentional and sometimes, we move way to fast.
Things are just not as they seem
As children, we dream bright and big and because we have dreamt it, it should be. Once out of high school you may realise that what was your passion previously doesn’t interest you anymore.
You may come to the difficult reality that the grades you got are not enough to do the program of your choosing. You may have to face the reality that you have no funds to further your education, you may not get a job.
Things are just not what they seem, very few of us get their lives together right after high school. Some of us will sit and have nothing to do for years, still trying to figure out what they want, someone’s college application will be rejected, someone will drop out of college, someone is going to start a business maybe because they need money.
Life is going to shock you; things may not go according to your imagination of it and that’s okay.
We are not honest with ourselves
I recently watched a reality show of a cooking competition, commenting on one of the contestants, one of the Judges said, “so and so is a very ambitious cook but their ambition supersedes their ability”.
It hit me, I realised that sometimes we overestimate our abilities, our skills, we overestimate our importance in people lives. We imagine ourselves all wise and all able, we even have a hard time forgiving our own mistakes because we expect so much from ourselves It is important for you to learn to be honest with yourself, face yourself, you are not perfect, accept it.
Accept that you are not everybody’s favourite, accept that you are not their type, accept that you come from a financially challenged background, accept that you find it easy to cry and you do it all the time. Learn to be as honest as you possibly can about yourself to yourself
Increased responsibility
When we are fully grown, our responsibilities grow with us, the thought that your life is now in your hands is a lot of responsibility. All the things your parents used to do for you become what you must do for yourself, the admin, the bills, the lifestyle you want and its upkeep.
But the greatest Jinx in adulthood is, you are not the only person you may have to take care of, you may have a child, a sibling including your parents.
You are answerable, you are answerable for your choice of words and actions; answerable to your own conscientious. At this age your relationships demand a greater expression of commitment, even the relationships you have had since birth they demand that you intentionally give to them.
The number of tasks for you to complete in day just keep increasing and the quality of your work is yet still expected too higher. There are increased expectations from the world, from the people around you and from yourself. This is just to say, you have come to your prime years and you now posses the ability to fit in such big boots.
We just won’t grow up
One of the reasons why growing is particularly hard is that we just won’t grow up. Some of us because of the shock becoming all responsible we sink into a mental state of being in perpetual denial of what rests on our shoulders.
We become partial in our adulthood; we choose to enjoy the freedom that comes being older, but we run away from the responsibilities that liberty presents us with. Here we are finally free from the Rules our parents governed us with, free from the high school laws, in fact we are finally under the laws of the country and the world, but we still don’t want to behave like individuals who owe it to each other to be good citizens of the country and the world.
We actively pollute the environment, we still don’t know how to solve conflict in conversation, we still don’t respect other people and their choices. We still don’t know how to deal with people we don’t know, and we are not even trying to work on these things.
We cherish the belief that people owe us and that things are not working for us because the world does not give us our dues. We walk around with such entitlement that has no back up and no basis. It’s harder to be an adult when you refuse to be one. It is of paramount importance to continuously evolve!