I experienced my first birthday away from my mom recently. I’ve never been someone who unironically exaggerated my birthday, or even tells people when it is, so it passed pretty discreetly. Yet for the whole day, I felt somewhat melancholy. I was left with a sense of “now what?” that I didn’t really know what to do with. The one thing that stood out to me, about the whole day, was my age. I was nineteen now. I had successfully survived my first year of “adulthood,” complete with living “by myself” for about four months. But what did that mean, “adulthood?”

I spent the majority of my life looking forward to becoming eighteen, more than I looked forward to turning thirteen, or sixteen, or twenty-one. For some reason, turning eighteen held significant weight to me. The event came and went -- I got my first tattoo, a symbol of my new identity as an adult. I placed so much significance on turning eighteen that I didn’t really think about what would happen when I turned nineteen.

It seems stupid now -- I am aware that I age, and I didn’t expect to stop aging once I reached eighteen. But turning nineteen was a weight -- an expectation. While being eighteen might make me “legally” an adult, realistically I’m not there yet. Turning eighteen, although I gained the legal representation as an adult, was just the beginning of my transition. Thus, turning nineteen just pushes me further down the road to true “adulthood.”

Part of me expected to be treated differently once I turned eighteen -- to be treated “like an adult.” In reality, I was treated exactly the same way I was when I was seventeen; except now, I’m held to a higher standard. In the eyes of the law, I now have the looming threat of being tried as an adult; in short, my actions now have consequences. But why now? Why is eighteen this magical number?

Looking back, I acted the same way I did when I was seventeen. I was under the control of several social institutions still; when I turned eighteen, I was still in high school and still lived with my parents. I now held the power to be represented in my government, though I missed election season by a couple weeks. Part of me is glad; realistically, I know nothing about politics -- yet I’m given a voice in them.

Over this past semester, I’ve had multiple professors on multiple occasions tell me, “this is college, you’re an adult now, so ...” in relation to something I should be doing or how I should be doing it. In essence, I only became an adult when I entered college, not when I reached legality. Yet the difference between high school and college was literally a couple months. How much was I supposed to change in that timeframe?

My sociology professor pointed out the contradiction during a lecture that there is a pressure to undergo a dramatic change in between twelfth grade and college, yet that same pressure doesn’t exist between middle school and high school, or any other transition students experience prior.

I’m expected to change, yet I’m not given the tools to do so. Another cliche I encountered often is, “this isn’t high school, we aren’t going to hold your hand anymore.” I always get defensive when I hear that one. I didn’t ask to have my “hand-held,” and I didn’t ask to be “spoon-fed.” It's not my fault that some teachers prefer to be lazy than actually prepare students for college. In actuality, the majority of my high school courses were actually harder than the batch I took my first semester of college.

Usually, within the same breath, professors would mention the “real world” when they said, “when you enter the real world.” That one always confused me -- apparently, I’ve been existing in some fantasy land my whole life. When I finally called one of my professors out on this, he explained that I didn't enter the real world until I was no longer supported by my family.

I’ve come to realize that my legal status as an adult means nothing, which begs the question: When does adulthood actually start? When I graduate from college? When I move out of the dorms and into my own apartment? When I have to pay for my own health or car insurance or when I have a career that allows me to financially support myself? These events will all take place separately and probably over the course of the next decade.

I am treated like an adult who hasn’t reached adulthood -- a contradiction that makes my head spin. I’m regarded as ignorant, regardless of the fact that my predicament wasn’t my fault; my school didn’t offer a consumer science or home economics course. I’m expected to be an adult or at least be on the way to becoming one, yet I was never taught how.

For now, I will live in limbo: between being treated like an adult and actually being one, between being a spoon fed high schooler and an independent thinker, between the “real world” and the one I’m in now. I might be nineteen now, but in my eyes, I’m still a kid. Although, apparently, I have a quarter-life crisis coming up that I have to worry about. Adulthood is definitely not what it cracked out to be. I should have enjoyed being sixteen more.