Growing Up

I became an adult rather quickly, or at least it felt like it. What was in all reality a slow process of maturation, both personal and physical, was condensed into one single moment when a friend asked me "When did you start thinking of yourself as an adult?" My immediate response was I hadn't yet, that I still thought of myself as essentially the same person that I had always been and that person was not an adult, perhaps not a child any longer but certainly not an adult. Adults were those older people who had jobs, real jobs, had gone to college, thought about getting married or had taken the plunge, bought homes and had become boring. My parents were adults. My grandparents were certainly adults. And yet here I was. Twenty five years old, a recent recipient of an MA in history, a handful of serious relationships under my belt, with more married friends every year and an increasingly stable social and personal life. No career yet, but I could feel it looming in the near future. Was I an adult? I certainly looked like one at a casual glance. My friend maintained that he started thinking of himself as an adult the day he had to start paying his own bills. That's certainly true, that's a rather boring fact of adult life, but it seems anti-climatic, like there should be some more meaningful gateway into adulthood than the shouldering of your own personal load of credit card debt. My problem stems from a notion of self-definition. I had never thought of myself as an adult, I had never stepped into that persona in my personal life and so, at least in my own eyes, I was not an adult. What the rest of the world thought when they saw me was of no real concern. I was simply me, the same person I had always been, and I refused to place any kind of artificial label or marker on my life that declared "Here marks the day upon which I entered into the life of an adult, with all its various rights and responsibilities." This was fine until recently. Many of my co-workers are younger than me. It was my mistake to discover how much younger than me they really were. I was surrounded by eighteen and nineteen year olds, some recent graduates from high school, some still finishing their senior year. Suddenly I went from "just one of the guys" to the older guy, the adult, the one with the college degrees and the grey hairs in his sideburns, the one who was eight years older than the rest of them, the one who was closer to thirty than to twenty, and who suddenly felt worn out and defeated by his hard won life experiences. I couldn't help it. I was an adult. I was one of them, I had joined the other team and there was nothing I could do about it. My sudden maturity and adult status took me by surprise. I couldn't help asking myself if this is how other people saw me, if they thought of me as an adult, as a grown up, as someone who was as boring as I assumed all of the adults that had always surrounded me were. It's an ongoing process of personal reconciliation with my new adult nature. I'm still not completely OK with the idea of not being a youth, or even a young adult any more. I suppose that everyone, eventually, has to grow up and we can't spend all of our lives trapped in the shelter and innocence of childhood. However, I do wish that it had come upon me easier, that I had been given time to come to terms with the fact that adulthood was fast approaching as opposed to being generation gapped by my co-workers and left reeling with the knowledge of my experiential and temporal separation from them.