I’m 20. Sometimes I don’t think I’ll ever feel like a grown-up. I’ve spent the last four years dealing with bipolar, and now that it’s finally controlled with medication, I feel like I have a lot of catching up to do. I don’t drive much, due to anxiety, even though I have a car. I go to school and I have a job, but I still live with my parents. Maybe I’ll be a grown-up when I finish college and start a career.
When did you feel like a grown-up? When you got your own place? When you got married? When you had kids? Never?
I’m 28, single, and totally self-supporting. I live alone, drive my own car, pay all my own bills, etc.
I don’t feel grown up at all. Even when I pay my bills on time and deposit a paycheck into my savings account, instead of spending it on clothing and bar tabs, I feel kind of like I’m playing a grown-up role, rather than actually being a responsible adult.
I’ve always assumed that I’d feel grown up the moment I had a kid, but that could be another fallacy. (I wouldn’t know. Don’t plan on having kids.)
Maybe we always feel fifteen somewhere in our minds, which is why old age is such a surprise.
I agree - AND I have kids and a wife and a mortgage. And I am an executive on the leadership team of a company. But I just feel like a kid who has stumbled onto ways to navigate the challenges of life in ways that don’t make Folks in Charge™ take my money away or send me to prison or anything. Yet.
Best of luck - what’s the line? “Life is what happens while you were making plans” or something like that…?
I’m 36, own a house, a car, and various other “things,” including “things” with names like “retirement account” and “investment fund.” I don’t really know what grown ups are supposed to feel like, so I guess I feel like one. Sometimes I do things I don’t want to do, but I do them because I have to or because it’s the right thing to do.
But I still feel pretty immature; I get irrationally angry over stupid stuff; I love sleeping in and taking naps; I watch cartoons; I’ll eat cereal for dinner.
I don’t think there comes a time when you start feeling like a grown up (unless you have kids; that there seems like it would sober anyone up). I think you just look around one day and find yourself somewhere you’re pretty happy to be.
I just remembered – when I was around the OP’s age, I was on a trip with my boyfriend and his parents. I remember having a conversation with his dad on that trip, and the subject of being an adult came up. His dad said that even when you’re thirty or forty or fifty, you never stop searching; you never feel fully adult; you’re always questioning.
I remember the conversation because some months later (after I’d broken up with the BF), the dad left the family and moved in with some woman and her kid. And then died. And apparently, at his funeral, he was eulogized as if this woman and her kid were his only family, and his other family – including his biological children, who he’d lived with and raised for more than 20 years – didn’t even exist. So maybe for him, being an adult meant turning his back on what he’d spent the prior quarter century building. Maybe it was best; maybe not.
Anyway, no great revelations about adulthood. I guess it takes different shapes for different people.
28, married, one kid, another on the way, working on a ph.d., and I still feel like kid.
To be honest, it’s getting annoying.
I forget the title now, but there’s actually a book about this. More people are reporting these days that they don’t feel like adults. That’s all I know about the book. How uninformative. Kind of childish for me to even mention it.
Later a song was written by an artist I don’t really like giving the same sentiment, but I swear I came up with the idea that: The “real world” was a lie our parents made up in order to keep us in line. There’s no such thing.
In my 30’s. The feeling was cemented in my 40’s. Now, prior to that it was not as if I didn’t behave maturely. I was married in my mid-twenties, had a child in my early thirties. Been paying a mortgage for a long time. Pay my taxes, show up to work. Got my degrees at night and advanced through the ranks at work.
But it wasn’t until my thirties when I didn’t often feel like I was doing an imitation of an adult (not always, mind you, but often enough). And now in my forties, I feel more or less completely like a grown-up.
So, don’t sweat it. Keep doing your best and it’ll all fall into place. (And take solace in the fact that even now someone like me can still have the occasional immature evening.)
I feel grown-up at certain times… when I’m teaching, filling out tax forms (ugh), doing grocery shopping… but at the same time I feel like I’m playing grown-up as well, like someone else already mentioned upthread. I like to think it’s kind of like learning, where the more you learn the more you realize how little you know; the older you become, the more you realize how immature you can be. Maybe it’s just me though.
I don’t feel like a grown-up either. I guess getting my own income, paying my bills, cooking for myself and sorting out life’s other little organisational things means that I am grown up, and occasionally (when my bod gets a twinge) I’m reminded that I am an old fart, but – yep. Still a kid. Just an older version of one.
I have a husband pushing fifty, a teenage daughter, have lost both my parents, and am taking care of my elderly in-laws. I own my own home, my own car, my own business and my own furniture. I am 42 and the One Officially In Charge Around Here.
And when no one’s around I turn the music up loud and sing into a hairbrush.
I feel old and decrepit and out-of-touch sometimes, but I rarely feel “adult.”
When I got reading glasses, I thought “WTF?”
When the doc told me I wasn’t a kid anymore, and need to stop climbing trees, I thought “WTF? Dooood, seriously, pay attention here, wouldja please?!”
On a serious note, marriages, divorces, graduations, mortgages, professional successes, professional failures, births, deaths, and hot flashes: none of them has made me feel like a real grown-up for more than a fleeting moment.
I was hit with a feeling of being old on my 20th birthday. I mean, I had been alive for 20 years! I am 24 now and I still don’t feel like a grown up. I occasionally feel like I am old, like when I set up my 401k or when I make long range plans for my career, but I read Harry Potter and eat frosting out of the can as if I were a 6 year old with no qualms.
I’ve just turned 35, and only finished school a couple of summers ago, no kids, playing a lot of X-Box, still no driver’s license, by far the youngest faculty in my department, hanging around college kids all the time, and my spouse works in a bike shop,and we eat too much pizza and drink too much beer. And I’m still trying to find a permanent job and unable to find a decent interview suit. So no, I don’t feel like an adult yet, but I’m not really eager to.
However, over the last 2 months my dad has gotten really sick and I’ve been faced with odd questions from people who apparently think I’m a responsible adult, like, “Will you authorize us to intubate?” and things like that-- scary questions. I’ve aged a lot in the last month.
The one time I really feel like a grown-up is when I’m chasing the crummy neighborhood kids out of our yard. I wouldn’t mind them hanging out in our yard so much, but they are destructive, and their parents are the type that would sue us if their little angels broke an ankle trying to dismantle the low brick wall outside of our house! :rolleyes:
You get better at sublimating, the older you get. Why do you think grown ups spend so much time talking about whether they should refinance their mortgages?
(My tongue is very slightly in my cheek right now.)
I was out to lunch with my boss at a local grocery store several years ago. Before we had come to the store we were talking about life phases (adulthood, childhood, etc). He spent a few minutes talking about how ‘We’re all a kid at heart’.
Five minutes later we’re walking behind a senior citizen pushing a cart and playing. He’d push the cart and let go raising his hands into the air; look ma, no hands!. My boss looked at me smiling and said “See, I told ya.”
