Mind Management Angela May

Oh, Grow Up.

Recently, someone asked me what the difference is between being an adolescent and an adult.

I just had a birthday on June 27th. I'm twenty-seven now. I don't really feel like a "grown-up", even though I'm a married Mechanical Engineer with a mortgage. My mid-thirties friends assure me that they don't feel "grown-up" either. Neither do my mid-forties friends. Even my mother says she doesn't feel like a grown-up (she just turned fifty-seven, also in June.)

So it's reasonable to discern, then, that "feeling fully and completely like a grown-up" isn't a state I'm likely to ever grow into. Or, maybe it's just the lucky ones who never feel that way.

Still, there needs to be some difference between an adolescent and an adult. Obviously, you can tell when you meet someone where they are at on this spectrum. It has little to do with age. A sixteen year old can become a father and hold down a full-time job as a manager. A thirty year old can still live with their parents and work part-time at a cafe. Because I went to engineering school, most of my friends lead very 'adult' lives, but I do encounter many people my age that seem to be stubbornly clinging to adolescence.

So, coming back to the original question: how does one define the boundary between adolescent and adult? I think for me, the definition comes down to three things:

• Career.
• Responsibility.
• Dealing with Serious Things.

CAREER

Now, by 'career' I don't mean that you wear a suit and tie and have a job-job in an office. Career, to me, means purpose: you have a clear (or clearish) vision of what you want to do with the rest of your life, and the majority of your time is spent actively pursuing it. By this definition, a person who may not even be employed but is actively, fervently pursuing success in a particular field has a 'career'. Of course, our career vision becomes more clear over time, and we may change direction, but as long as we're striding confidently SOMEWHERE as opposed to drifting from one meaningless job to another, we have a 'career'.

RESPONSIBILITY

Both in the having and the taking, responsibility is a major divider between an adolescent and an adult. Living on your own and paying your own rent. Taking accountability for your own failures. Owning a dog, or having a child. It means being present and accountable: without YOU it would fall apart.

DEALING WITH SERIOUS THINGS

A major facet of adulthood is that a considerable portion of your time is spent just dealing with serious things. Things that your parents used to do for you. Boring, painful "ugh it's just gotta get done" things. Taxes, paying bills, repairing things around the house, sorting out insurance, laundry, scheduling your own dentist appointments, investments... "serious things" can also mean injury, disease or death. I guess the best way to define it would be "dealing with things that have real-world, severe consequences." If a care-taker is still doing these things for you, it's a major piece of adulthood you still lack.

One may not have all three of these aspects prominently in their lives, but these are the three things that, for me, divide the adolescents from the adults.

Now...Is "adulthood" the right thing?

Is adulthood something that we SHOULD be pursuing as quickly as possible?

Perhaps, perhaps not. I'm not sure the early-adults are "right", just as much as I'm not sure the late-adults are "wrong". Sometimes I regret becoming so serious so soon. I've always been very responsible and driven, and so I marched lock-step into adulthood without really considering the alternatives. These are just things that I feel define "adulthood", not necessarily the way life should to be lived.

Charging your Adolescent Batteries

Recently, I've been faced with a stack of some very serious, very adult things. It's nothing bad... just boring "ugh it needs to just be DONE sort of things". I've been putting it off.

Last week, for my birthday, I took the week off of work. I didn't go anywhere, and I didn't really have anything concrete that I wanted to accomplish, I just wanted to.....not work.

And oh, boy did I ever NOT work! I woke up when I wanted, wore what I wanted, went where I wanted just 'cause I wanted to. My chores languished, my diet languished, and my work certainly didn't get worked on. I'm proud to say the vacation wasn't wasted, though... I threw myself into my Big Scary Writing Project. I finished chapters 3 and 4, which completes "book one" of the story. I didn't keep count, but I estimate that in this week I slammed down about sixty pages of thumbs! It was awesome.

What I realized at the end of the week is that I was basically acting like an adolescent again! You'd think that after this exhilarating taste of adolescence, I'd never want to go back to adulthood. But, here I am at work on a Monday morning and I'm amazed at how READY I feel to tackle some more "adult" responsibilities! By not being so serious, I got rid of a LOT of stress. So, I guess that's the one learning from this rambling post.

Sometimes you need to un-grow-up to tackle grown-up things

Grow Up by Chromeo (mp3)