Adults

A few years ago, when I turned 32, I was struck with a realization-- in that way where when an idea hits you with physical force, it seems truer than the ones that wander through or the ones that you invite through rumination. The thing that struck me was that 32 was basically like being 16 again. I felt like I was surrounded still, maybe more than ever, with teen-like angst, with adolescent drama, even from faculty "adults" as old as my parents or aunts and uncles at least.  Even if 32 could barely be considered adult these days, they should surely surely be grown ups.
And so I became convinced that there is really no such thing as this mythical state we call "adulthood." We often treat adolescence and behaviors designated as such as somehow unreal--an act that people (even teenagers) need to snap out of: "Grow up," we say. "Act like an adult."
But I decided then that adulthood is the fantasy, the imaginary state we aspire to (or wish others would ascend to) while we all remain mired in the status quo reality of outsize feelings about petty drama and bratty selfishness.. just like teenagers. Even more so than teenagers, I sometimes think, because we have so much more power and we have accrued more and more relationships that we can mess with.

Some more time has passed. Any second I'll be in my "mid 30's." Maybe I already am. And so most of my friends are getting to this age, give or take 10 years, and my parents are getting older (seriously, "parent" always seemed like a static state to me, but now they talk about retirement and minor medical procedures and getting senior discounts on things. What's happening?!). Babies are raining down all over the place. And recently a number of really tragic things seem to be happening all over my facebook feed: my dear friend Jim died tragically young a year ago, another friend is fighting stage IV cancer, another friend's wife has been diagnosed in the last two weeks with "an aggressive brain tumor in an eloquent area of her brain." Other friends are losing their parents, dealing with divorces, or with chronic and life-ending illnesses amongst family members and friends.  It feels like the list of tragedies and life-shattering traumas is suddenly growing much more rapidly.

And I thought, is this what it is to be an adult? Is it to encounter tragedies and actually, unbelievably, shockingly, to come through it. Not to thrive, necessarily, but to realize that you survive, that you are at some level, okay. Is attaining adulthood not necessarily to attain some mythical level of level-headedness, rationality, and competence but instead to just be broken and broken and broken and realize that you can still get up and go on. And that when you don't go on, that's also, actually, okay.

It seems like a double edged sword to me, this ability to be okay. It could entail a certain kind of jadedness, a hardness that shuts out the hurt of others and oneself, even if only as a defense against it. I don't want to be that kind of adult. But it could also be something that seems to me about the most admirable thing I can think of, which is a sort of repaired and reparable fragility: One that acknowledges that we were built to spill, but that breaks can be repaired. Not a good as new kind of repair, but a kind of patched up, scarred perfection that acknowledges every knock, every disappointment, every tragedy and yet also acknowledges that we can go on. That imperceptibly, we end up basically okay. Is growing up realizing that actually, mostly, basically, it's going to be okay?