things no one told me about becoming an adult

Being in your early 20s is so weird. One minute, you feel like you have your life together. You go to the gym, go to work, you do your groceries and your washing. You keep your room clean and tidy and forget that if you were a real adult you would have your own apartment and not an overpriced rented room in a flat full of people who were once strangers. You’ve learnt how to handle most social situations; how to politely tell the waitress at the café that she’s charged you for two coffees, instead of one, how to deal with your grumpy supervisor at work and how to say no to things you don’t want to do. For a moment, you can actually believe that you have it all worked out. ‘This life thing isn’t as difficult as everyone makes it out to be,’ you think. ‘You just go to work, eat well, pay your bills and try to enjoy everything else in the meantime.’ You even feel kind of snarky about it, ‘What’s so hard about this?’ You ask yourself, until one day, as you’re drinking your morning coffee unsuspectedly, The Hard Thing arrives. The Hard Thing is only one of the many strange and messy experiences I have discovered on my journey to adulthood that had no one ever told me about.

I find that The Hard Thing usually arrives when you’re least expecting it. When life has been going smoothly, maybe even a little too smoothly. There have been no ups or no downs, just plain old life. What sets The Hard Thing apart from other difficult things that you may deal with in your life is that The Hard Thing is something that only you find hard. Therefore, to define a problem as a ‘Hard Thing,’ it must be a problem that, for other people, your reaction to, seems completely out of proportion. In essence, your Hard Thing must be other people’s No Big Deal. And that’s what makes it so hard.

The worst thing about your Hard Thing being other people’s No Big Deal is that you end up taking advice from people who don’t empathise with your situation and use their reaction as a way to measure how hard you should find The Hard Thing, resulting in you beating yourself up for how hard you actually do find The Hard Thing. Instead of being compassionate and allowing yourself the time and grace to deal with the situation, you waste even more energy by becoming frustrated with yourself , your reaction and your feelings.

For example, I struggled a lot with the transition to university. I felt like I couldn’t find my place. My parents and all my aunts and uncles had raved about how fun university was, how great it was to party every night, meet new people and live independently for the first time. I used to torture myself over not having the same experience. Why couldn’t I just be like them? Why couldn’t I be normal? I thought that I just wasn’t trying hard enough to have a good time. So I tried harder. I went out partying more, I forced myself to do things I didn’t want to do, to spend time with people I didn’t like and ultimately, of course, I ended up becoming ten times more miserable than I had started out. If I had just accepted that I was dealing with a Hard Thing instead of acting like I was dealing with something that was No Big Deal, life would have been so much easier.

But that’s the thing about Hard Things, you spend more time internally criticising your reaction than you spend actually reacting. You gaslight yourself into thinking there is no actual problem, that if you had just worked harder, tried harder, studied more, everything would be fine. However, once you learn to realise that your Hard Thing is actually a hard thing, instead of obsessing about how it should be No Big Deal, your Hard Thing becomes a lot easier to deal with. My interpretation of this experience is that by going through a Hard Thing, you get to know yourself better. What you struggle with, what you like and don’t like. Who you should go to for advice, whose advice you should take with a pinch of salt and how ultimately, your experiences will always differ from the experiences of others. You learn how it is absolutely necessary to put context to a situation in order to evaluate how to deal with it and that there is no such thing as one size fits all reaction. Most importantly though, you learn that you need to trust yourself to make your own decisions. Unfortunately, I think that this is a lesson always learnt the hard way.

Another strange experience that no one tells you about becoming an adult is that one day you will realise that you are the responsible adult in the room. This realisation hit me like a ton of bricks pretty soon after I started my teaching job in Alicante. Up until this point, at work, I had physically been the only adult in a room full of children and so of course I was ‘The Adult in the Room,’ therefore, this experience shouldn’t have shocked me nearly as much as it did. However, I was completely taken aback one Thursday afternoon when one of my student disclosed something in class that I thought should only be disclosed to a responsible adult. ‘Okay,’ I replied, internally panicking because I had no idea how to handle the situation. ‘So if something like that happens, you need to tell a responsible adult.’ It took around 20 milliseconds for the realisation to slap me in the face. I was the responsible adult. ‘Like me,’ I said, ‘Thanks for telling me.’ Immediately, I felt a complete shift in my perspective and I began to question every so called responsible adult that I had previously confided in throughout my lifetime. Naturally as a child, I thought that adults had their lives together. They worried about things like bills and mortgages and complained about work but all in all, they were people who had their lives together, not people like me who lived in a flat share and had pasta and ketchup for dinner when they forgot to go grocery shopping. Very quickly, as other students in the class began to confide in me, I realised that if I had suddenly become the responsible adult despite my lack of teaching qualifications, lack of mental health training and lack of life experience, responsible adults probably weren’t as responsible as I had previously thought.

The realisation that adults are completely different from what you had previously perceived applies to your parents too and at some point on your journey to adulthood, you begin to realise that your parents are actually people, individuals with their own identity and not just your mum and dad. I vividly remember arguing with my class mates when I was around 6 years old that, ‘My daddy is bigger than your daddy,’ and that ‘My daddy can do more toe taps than your daddy.’ I thought my parents were super heroes. I remember being five years old in my grandmother’s house in France, holding my mum’s hand and telling her, ‘I don’t understand why anyone would ever argue with their mummy,’ because, according to 5 year old me, my mummy was always right. I’m not sure 16 year old Clare would have agreed but nonetheless, there comes a point in your life when you realise, especially if you go into a different career from your parents, that there are actually some things that you know better than them. Realising this for the first time actually comes as a bit of a scare. Your whole life you have trusted their advice and their word. Their version of reality was God’s truth. Until one day, it isn’t anymore and you have to rely on your own interpretation of the world to get through. Trusting yourself for the first time is terrifying, and I don’t think it’s something that you ever do until you have no other choice, at least for me it wasn’t. However, realising that you can trust yourself to make your own decisions feels like unlocking the next level of adulthood where the opportunities and possibilities are endless. Cue the existential crisis.

5 year old me posing for a passport photo

All in all, despite these strange realisations, I love the journey I am on. I love becoming an adult and I love being able to make my own decisions. I remember how people would tell me when I was younger that my school days would be the best days of my life. ‘If this is as good as it gets, it really doesn’t get very good,’ I thought. But they couldn’t have been more wrong. Every year that I get older I become more content, more confident and happier in myself. My life gets better every year and I learn more and more about myself, other people and the world around me. Okay, some days I feel as though my life is crumbling around me, but usually I wake up the next morning and realise that a broken phone or an argument with a flatmate is not the end of the world and that life is actually pretty good. As long as your rent is paid, you and your loved ones are healthy and you have food in the fridge, there really isn’t very much to complain about.