Almost everyone has been there. It's the dreaded and inevitable reality of life.
Adulthood.
I'm 21 and fast approaching this scary reality, and while everyone reassures me that I'll figure it out, I'm not convinced because I don't think you ever really figure out adulthood. I haven't even graduated college yet (six more weeks though) but it's like I'm plunging down this twirling water slide where scary things jump out at you and the slide isn't wet in some places, so it leaves you with marks and bruises as you go shooting into the unknown. Sure, maybe it gets a little easier — people survive it, at least, so there's a silver lining for everyone else fast-approaching post-graduation life.
Growing up, I guess I was sheltered enough to think that adults had it all figured it out. They paid their bills, they took their kids on vacation, they went to bed and woke up every morning in a relatively good mood. I wanted to be a grown up because that meant that I would have a job and a house and a nice bookcase, a dog and a cat curled up on the couch. Eventually I would get married and add a few kids to the fray, but it would all be OK. There's a certain glamor when you think of being an adult as a child. Everybody seems to know what they're doing.
I found out that they don't. That glamor is actually just fake paint that starts to chip away as you get older and realize how hard being an adult actually is. Bills are a lot of money, and there's a lot more you have to pay for than you think. Vacations generally aren't to Disney World or someplace fancy like that, but instead are a nice outing to a park because it's free. Houses don't usually have room for bookcases, and if they are there, the books are messy and crammed onto the shelves and sometimes they fall off and hit you in the head. The dogs always bark and the cats scratch the furniture and the kids don't take naps when they're supposed to. And marriages aren't as easy as Disney princesses and movies make them look. Getting a job is a lot harder than it seems, but you don't learn that until you're out of college, jobless, living at home, wondering where it all went wrong. And even though everyone starts telling you that life doesn't get any easier, willful ignorance is your response. Nobody wants to believe that things don't get easy. The thought that college is actually the time where we have it most together is terrifying.
There's this harsh reality that starts to set in as you get older and realize that adulthood is actually not what it's cracked up to be. Everyone goes through this too: The overwhelming desire to just go back to being a kid when our only concern was whether we were going to get McDonald's for lunch that day and if it was raining because that would mean we didn't get to play outside. But then, you learn how bad McDonald's is for your health and that even if it's a torrential downpour outside, you still have to go to work.
It'll work out, sure. Everything in life does. What is going to happen will happen, and one day, your kids will take naps when they're supposed to, and you'll get to go to Disney World where the princesses are happily married. One day, the bookshelves will be (relatively) organized so that books don't fall on your head. And you'll be happy too because things have - at least, a little bit - seemed to figure themselves out.
So while I enjoy these last six (oh god) weeks of college and the bubble that is has created for me, I, like most college seniors, will be panicking about the future and graduating, being an adult and figuring out the next step in life. And I also, like most other college seniors, know that no matter how much we plan for life after graduation, it won't go as smoothly as we think it should. But hey, that's OK. We've survived this long. The next step won't be any worse. It'll just be different.
