Have you forgotten to shower for the past three days? Do you have the option to eat healthy foods like fruit and eggs but choose to eat Easy Mac anyway? Do you sometimes accidentally stay up until 2:30 in the morning because you don’t realize how late it is? Congratulations! Just like me, you are a Halfway Adult! Welcome to the club!

Being a Halfway Adult is a strange phase of life. You don’t have to do adult things like wash your own dishes or shop for furniture or figure out what exactly a mortgage is (they sound scary and I don’t want to know), but suddenly you have to remember to wash your sheets and use your time productively and worry about What To Do With Your Life. No one can really tell you what to do anymore, which is liberating and wonderful, but at the same time, you don’t quite know exactly what to do without someone telling you because of school institutions/strict parents/the status quo/et cetera. If you want to, you can eat Domino’s at midnight on a Thursday with your friends! But you really probably shouldn’t do that. Or should you? Who knows???

By far the most difficult aspect of being a Halfway Adult is balance. Merriam-Webster defines ‘balance’ as, “the state of having your weight spread equally so that you do not fall,” but for Halfway Adults the proper definition of ‘balance’ is, “making sure you do all the things you need to do but not doing so many things that you break down and become a scientologist.” You should have already learned how to do some of this balancing as a Quarter Adult, but it might be difficult as a new Halfway Adult if you had to change your definition of ‘balance’ as soon as you got to college. For some people, the definition of ‘balance’ as a Quarter Adult is, “school is easy so you should have fun and never do any homework,” and for others it is “do a lot of extracurricular activities and take a lot of AP classes and stay up until one in the morning doing your homework otherwise your whole life will be a miserable failure.” Neither of these are good definitions of ‘balance’ for a Halfway Adult.

I was disappointed to find out that there is no Life Instruction Manual for being a Halfway Adult. You just have to figure things out on your own. You will make mistakes, but you will also learn a lot and you will be better prepared for the day when you blossom into a Full and Complete Adult. (Except for with mortgages. I don’t think anyone can ever truly prepare for those.)

In the meantime, here’s some advice about being a Halfway Adult for those Quarter Adults who will be here soon:

• Do not eat soft serve for breakfast. The option exists. Do not do it.
• Wash your sheets more frequently than you think you have to.
• Put your keys on a carabiner and then you can clip them to yourself and you’ll never forget them.
• Get everything done but also make time for yourself.
• The best times to shower are two in the afternoon and two in the morning. I don't know why this is true, but it is.
• Everything will be fine.