#adulting. I have seen this just about everywhere on social media, and #adulting is one of the hashtags that 18-22 year-olds use slightly sarcastically and slightly seriously. I am 20 years old, and I have never used #adulting. But what does this hashtag imply? And am I fully an adult without the #adulting?
I'm in college. The fact that I have sold my soul to tuition and loans can't really be ignored. The state mandates that at the age of 18, I have my life together enough to be considered an adult. These are facts. But why don't I feel like an adult?
I think a large amount of the cause of my uncomfortable transition period between teenager-hood and adulthood is because I have such a future of uncertainty. When I was in high school, things were easy. You do your homework, you live with your parents, you follow the rules and your life and schedule is largely controlled for you. But when you get into college, everything changes. You are expected to go on a four-year journey of self-discovery and experiential learning. There is a lot expected of us in the time that it takes an infant to reach the end of toddlerhood. Four years is often simultaneously an eternity and a blink of a moment for the aforementioned reason.
Maybe my lack of feeling adult is attributed to what my definition of being a "grown up" is. I presume I have been conditioned to perceive adults and grown ups as well-adjusted individuals who work from 9-5, then come home to the house that they have a mortgage on, eat dinner with their family, watch television and then go to bed only to repeat the process in the morning. By this definition, I am not grown up. I go to school all day, forget to eat, do homework, exercise, watch YouTube on my phone and then sleep. I don't have a mortgage or a family to support, but I have my own bills and whatnot. So maybe I am kind of a grown up?
But what about levels of maturity? Does that make me #adulting? Who even knows how to gauge my maturity level at this point? I live on a college campus whose demographic is primarily middle to upper class white kids from the suburbs who have always attended private schools. I am not necessarily sure if I can compare levels of maturity to the peers I go to school with because they are such a small cross-section of a giant demographic that I do not see on a regular basis. Henceforth, there is no way that I can gauge my adult maturity against my frequently seen peers.
As you can see, I am not sure what #adulting even is. The only thing I can gather from my thought process is that if I have to question my adulthood, I therefore must not be an adult. I still have a ways to go before I grow up, just as many of my peers do. I guess we will all just keep trying to fully be #adulting.
