Julie Lythcott-Haims - Your Turn: How to Be an Adult

my whole life is on the tip of my tongue

empty pages for the no longer young

Indigo Girls, Virginia Woolf

As you read this Im past the halfway point of my life, and my young adulthood waves at me in the rearview mirror. The wrinkles I thought Id somehow avoid stand out in every photo. The gray hairs I started plucking when they first arrived are overtaking the brown. My college sweatshirt feels even softer than it did back in the day, but it has a lot of holes. My dying days are nearer, I know. Is that weird to say? Maybe. But, its true. Yet even so, I am still becoming me. And you are becoming you. This I also know.

What a cool thing.

You may think that adulting is all about paying your taxes and trying to make sense of the benefits package at work (assuming youre lucky enough to have a benefits package, or steady work for that matter). But you would be wrong to think its all about that stuff. It is about that stuff. But thats like saying high school is about registering for classes and finding your locker.

Think bigger. Adulting cant be boiled down to ten tips or even a thousand. Being an adult is a state of mind that ignites the doing that ends up forging your adult self. Its part wanting to, part having to, and part learning how. The hardest part is that because its happening in your own mind you pretty much do it by yourself. Yet you have all the adult humans around you going through it, too. They get it.

I wish I could tell you why adulting seems so complicated or unattractive these days. Maybe your parents generation gave off a lot of stress and anxiety and you looked at them and thought, Blech! Who would want to do that? Or maybe all the basic life skills just arent learned at home or taught in school anymore, and you feel like an idiot for not knowing how to do what older people think you should already know how to do by now. Maybe your parents were like superheroes who stepped in to help with everything right in the nick of time, so you didnt get a lot of practice handling messy situations or tough feelings. Maybe its your friends who seem like superheroes, out there on the right track in Adult Land, and youre judging yourself for not being as far along as they are. Maybe it all just feels like a lot.

Just gonna pause here to say that the right track concept is bullshit. I swear to you there is no track, no path, no lockstep plan that equals adulting that youre somehow failing to adhere to. Life is too grand and mysterious for any track to keep up with. Its a wide-open landscape like the Pacific Ocean, the Rocky Mountains, the high plateaus of Montana, the sweeping fields of Iowa or Louisiana, the intricate grid of a major city like Chicago, Atlanta, or New York. You get to decide where to be out there, what youre doing, and how to navigate toward it. Youll have others with youthe people you choose to spend your life with. But youll chart your particular path on your own. And if you want to feel really alive youll examine your choices continually and make adjustments every now and then.

Adulting is a relatively new verb (thank you, Millennials) but the concept is as natural as breathing. In the twentieth century, psychologists came up with five markers of adulthood, which were, in this order: finish your education, get a job, leave home, marry, and have children. This old idea is the definition your generation has been held to. Yet so much has changed about life and living since that definition was formulated:

Finish your education. Why finish your education at eighteen or twenty-two when youre probably going to live to a hundred? Today we know that going back to school throughout the later decades of your life is a great thing, whether its to gain a new skill set or to soak up the enrichment that comes from lifelong learning.