What We Needed In Our Twenties
Adulthood (noun): the state or condition of being fully grown or mature.
There’s an intermediate period where you can find solace in being a young adult. That waiting room before the full brink of expectations and pressure. A waiting room full of sexually-charged, fumbling, neurotic, messy haze. That’s where we are.
On the walls of this waiting room sentences clank around like daggers. Question marks at the end of them drop like 20kg weights on toes. What will I do? How will I save enough money? When will I find a partner? Is my health in shit? Am I a failure?
Then one day we burst out of that waiting room with our goodie bag of mortgages, cars and fertility problems. At least, I think that’s what the 30s are.
Probably the 40s too.
But the key issue is that above definition of adulthood, “the state of being fully grown or mature”. That kind of definition leaves us to consider the proposition that adulthood in fact does not exist.
First, mature. There are aged women who want to pinch bums and men who scrap in the pub over a gentle nudge (that was actually someone telling them their pint is spilling).
So maturity, we don’t need to worry about you.
It’s fully grown that puts creases on my forehead. Fully. Grown.
Imagine that — people walking around fully developed, content with boxes ticked, ready to be packaged and sent off to the Adulthood Factory… Has anyone seen those people?
Taking a step back and looking at the questions on the waiting room wall, you could try and figure out what you need to get into this place they call adulthood. Try and figure out what you need to hit home runs with 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024 and the procession after that.
There is an answer. But there’s also a problem with that answer.
The problem is that this thing that’s required to launch into adulthood seems to be lacking in a lot of developed people with additional years under their belt. This is going to sound like some preachy Horoscope dot com shit but — the answer is courage.
It takes courage to quit a job to try another path. It takes courage to say no when you might seem impolite if you do. It takes courage to back away from an old friend who quite honestly is going to joyride you into a grave. It takes courage to move away to a different country. It takes courage to tell someone you love them. Or courage to not say it back.
All of those questions and question marks in the waiting room of adulthood don’t have easy answers. And if something’s not easy, surely it’s going to take bravery to tackle it.
So, we’re onto that problem with this answer for passing over to adulthood. If courage is key, then why is there a lack of it?
Why is there a man who has been talking about moving abroad for ten years now, but continues on his dreary conveyor belt.
Why are there two women in Wexford chatting over a cup of tea, one too afraid to tell the other the way she speaks about the immigrants isn’t alright. Even if the other is her nagging sister.
Why are there parents too afraid to address the pain in their household? They’ll sign the birthday cards and hoover the carpets but not for a second will they lift them up.
And that one is tough. It takes a brave person to tell someone how you feel. Full stop. It takes a brave person to address pain. Full fucking stop.
So sitting in this waiting room of fumbling twenty somethings, I can only conclude one thing. That adulthood, or at least all the embellishments of it, aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. To be honest, the best adults are often the ones who seem like big kids wearing a tie. Not quite two year old could-set-the-house-on-fire kids. Just the OK-without-the-babysitter ones.
We can fret and panic about making a good exit from the young adulthood waiting room with solid credit ratings, clear cut paths and certainty. Or we can walk out with a little courage, knowing that everyone is trying to figure it out.
We can walk out bopping along to tunes like that Arcade Fire one.
The one that says:
We’re just a million little gods causin’ rain storms,
Turnin’ everything good to rust,
I guess we’ll just have to adjust!
