After an entire year of living as an adult, I still don’t have things figured out.

I remember the first few days I lived as a legal adult. I watched "Tangled," my favorite movie (to this day); I ate pizza, my favorite food; and I bought a lottery ticket with my mom. The cashier studied the child-like face in my ID picture in what I could only interpret as disbelief. Suffice it to say, my first few days of adulthood -- okay, even my current days of adulthood -- are this weird mesh of having grown-up responsibilities, like living on my own, but still feeling like a kid by buying dinosaur shaped chicken nuggets at the store.

Now, I just turned 19 years old, which is kind of awful and kind of awesome.

It’s awful because I’m stuck in this age of still being a teenager, but not really feeling like a teenager anymore. And I still don’t feel like a for-real adult yet, either. Nothing fun happens when you turn 19, because all the fun stuff happened at 18 or is saved for 21. Being 19 is something I almost cringe at when I have to say it. I’m an adult, but I’m not very good at adulting yet. I feel like I am simultaneously a baby and an old maid.

However, turning 19 is also kind of awesome. The saving grace of turning 19 is that no one really expects me to have my life put together yet, which is perfect considering my life falls apart on the reg. Seriously. I’m allowed to stumble along this path of adulthood because I’m still adjusting to the learning curve. Being 19 is awesome because I’m an adult who doesn’t get too harshly judged for asking What in the world is a 401K? or Will eating week-old macaroni will kill me?

So far I’ve made it a whole year as an adult, and if you ask me, that’s a pretty big accomplishment. I’ve got a lot more experience under my belt now. For example, I now know that just because I can stay up until 3 a.m. binge-watching Netflix doesn’t mean that I should. I know that being BFFs with your parents is actually a really great thing. I know that being able to buy a car with your own money, under your own name, is awesome, but taxes are not as awesome… and trying to sell a car is even less awesome.

Most importantly, I’ve learned that it’s okay to not know everything. People don’t expect me to know everything, either. No, I’m not sure how to fill out an insurance form at the hospital completely. No, I don’t know how long it takes to fully cook chicken in the oven.

And that’s okay.

I felt like when I turned 18 years old, I was supposed to magically know how to adult overnight. Like somehow I would wake up and all of life’s mysteries (like what kind of budgeting plan is best for a broke college student) would be revealed to me. And of course, that didn’t happen. And it still didn’t happen when I turned 19. I’m starting to think that it doesn’t ever happen to anyone, even when you’re 20 or 30 or 60.

You know, the thing is -- life is all about figuring stuff out as you go. Just like it’s okay not to know everything, it’s also okay to still act like a kid sometimes. Yeah, I still sleep with a pillow pet, and yeah, there are coloring books on my bookshelf. There isn’t one specific way to adult. And that’s what makes it even better.

Getting older is scary, but it can be a lot less scary when you realize that it’s normal to not really know what you’re doing 100 percent of the time.

So to my fellow 19-year-olds: let’s embrace this last year of being a teenager. Eat your dinosaur chicken nuggets, and call your mom to ask how long to bake a real chicken breast. Celebrate adulting moments, like when you successfully pick up a prescription from the pharmacy for the first time on your own. Figure out how to adult as best you can, but don’t adult so hard that you lose the kid in you.

And don’t worry… we’ve still got plenty of years left to figure it all out.