You forgot the disclaimer…
Oct 18th, 2011 by heidi
The thing they don’t tell you about adulthood as a kid, when you dream of all the freedom that you’ll have when you’re grown up, is that as an adult, you don’t get the kid- or teen-excuse card to play that is sort of your get-out-of-jail-free. Your excuse to do, say, and feel whatever’s on your mind and have it all written off as “teenage angst.”
Not as an adult. When you’re having a hormonal sort of day, your son woke up with a cough and you had to keep him home from kindergarten even though he wanted to go, and you found out that one of your very best work colleagues (one of those people that keeps you going to work in the first place) is moving away, and everyone seems to be NEEDY!NEEDY!NEEDY, and you didn’t get anything tangible accomplished over the weekend, and said work friends is going out with two other work friends and you were invited but can’t go because they set it at about the ONLY time during the day when your schedule precludes it, and you are being expected to know information that nobody gave you in the first place, and all you want to do is either throw a screaming tantrum or huddle up in a ball and weep…you don’t get to.
You get to smile, and do the job at the time that you had it scheduled, and you don’t get to go home, and you don’t get to say that you don’t wanna do it and you’re not gonna, and you suck it up and you do it. Because if you don’t, you’ll lose your job, and you’ll lose your income, and the little person at home depending on you won’t get the new clothes he needs, and you’ll default on your student loans and and and…
And you still have to do it anyway. And it sucks. It sucks so much that I wonder why I ever wanted to be a grown up anyway. Being in high school and college might have been some of the most screwed-up, depressing, horrible times of my life…but at least I could go home, cry, and think that some day, as a grown up, it would be better. I’d make it better.
And I haven’t.
As a teenager, you can always think that it may suck now but it is going to get better. As an adult, not so much. This could be as good as it gets, ever.
And I thought I had it bad back then!
Whenever I feel like this, I pull up this and look at it:
http://xkcd.com/150/
Strange as it sometimes seems, we are the adults now! We get to decide what it means, even if we choose do it within the limits of practicality. We don’t have to be the adults that our parents were, we can invent new ways to be grownups!
Sorry, I know it sounds all floaty, but it helps me sometimes to think this way
I KNOW.
Yesterday I got all weepy for no really good reason–yes, I know there’s the funeral on Saturday and I know that’s affecting me more than I necessarily realize, but STILL–and then there was all the horribleness of DramaBoy that I told you about and MTL had a horrible day at work and so he is taking a mental health day and I NEED A MENTAL HEALTH DAY but I can’t really take one right now and…
Yeah. Being an adult is WAY overrated.
There are some compensations, though. I’m going to focus on that now.
Even so, I still prefer being an adult. My memory is not so bad that I can’t remember the utter powerlessness of youth. I don’t remember any get-out-of-jail-free card. There are a lot more things you can do and demand as an adult. And when you earn money, you have more say in how it is spent.
Yes, adulthood has its problems, but I’ll take it over being a kid any day.