I’ve been thinking a lot lately about growing up, and adulthood. I say that as a 31 year old woman who has been working in corporate America for the past 10 years.
I don’t feel like an adult, at all. I feel like a teenager, like I’m perpetually stuck at 18 years old. I don’t know why that is, I don’t know how to make it stop and to channel the grown woman I am today.
I live on my own, I have bills, I have a job I love, I can take care of myself but something inside me doesn’t feel mature enough to classify myself as an adult.
It might be because I’m single; all my friends are married, a few even have kids, and I simply cannot process the idea of coming home to a husband every night, of having to share my space with someone no matter how much I love him.
I cannot fathom being able to care for a child, to know their needs and wants, to put them before myself.
My freedom is too important to me right now; the luxury I have of laying in my bed at 10 AM on a Saturday, typing this out. The freeing feeling of being able to come and go as I please, to do what I want when I want. Maybe I’m just too selfish right now, too selfish to feel like an adult.
Or maybe it’s my anxiety and depression that has stunted my growth, the changes that I’ve gone through in the past decade; heartbreak, death, unemployment, a pandemic, more heartbreak…maybe I have gone through too much or haven’t experienced enough to mentally be 31 years old.
Sometimes I sit and reminisce about high school and college, and the memories feel like yesterday but then I have to remind myself that it was over a decade ago. Maybe I’m too stuck in the past to mature beyond my teenage years, maybe I have too many regrets— not of things I have done but things I have not done.
I was not a wild child, I was a rule follower, the traditional and typical oldest daughter. I had my fair share of fun but there was always that nervousness hiding behind my smile, that feeling of waiting for the other shoe to drop, to be caught, to be scolded.
I am very stuck in my ways; I have grown since I was 18, of course, but maybe I haven’t done what I’m meant to do, or become who I’m meant to be. I feel stuck at such a crossroads, of knowing who I was, who I want to be but ultimately who I am.
How do you grow up? How do you feel like you’re an adult? How do I not look at a 23 year old and relate to them in some way, because I’m certainly not the same as them. How do I look at men on dating apps who are 40 and not cringe, thinking I could never date a 40 year old…when in all actuality, I definitely could. It would only be an 8-9 year difference.
How do I come into adulthood when I’ve already been here for so long?
Or maybe, simply, I am too in my head and need to stop focusing on how I feel and just live a little more.