College students are a widely generalized chunk of the populace. Whether you’re a fresh-faced, wide-eyed 18-year-old new to the big city and completely naive to the lustful ugliness of the world or a 40-something commuter student finally getting around to the bachelor’s degree you never had time (or money) for, the individuals that comprise a college’s student body are impossibly diverse and frequently underestimated.

It’s commonplace to put college “kids” in a neat little giftwrapped box, tied up with a shiny bow of inexperience and childish problems.

That’s bulls**t.

The real tragedy is that most college students aren’t aware that it’s bulls**t.

We twenty-somethings are adults with real adult responsibilities, problems and hangups. We pay bills, we sleep too little, we drink too much, we work too hard. The only thing that keeps us from attracting the attention and respect of elders is the arbitrarily assigned title we bear.

The definition of adulthood is loose and ever-changing, which is why the antiquated, sophomoric definition of college students is entirely inappropriate.

College, for many people, is the absolute beginning of an adult life. It’s not a transitional period or a liminal space between youth and wizened age. It’s here. Now. And it slaps us in the face with the big, fat calloused hand of debt, exhaustion and responsibility. There is no preparation. High school is for frivolity and carelessness. But the transition is instant and harsh.

One minute, you’re drinking in a cornfield with friends after a JV football game and the next minute, you’re drowning in a roiling, frothing sea of health insurance bills, apartment renovation costs, friends marrying and dying, full-time jobs, 16-credit semesters, etc. etc. The list doesn’t f**king end.

This isn’t a message for adults. We’re not demanding to be taken seriously. This is a message for you fellow young adults. We all get it. We all live it day after day. We’re all told to stifle our infant cries about sleepless nights and student loan debt. But this is real now. We can’t tell our friends what we want to be when we grow up because we’re in it, baby. This is the thick of our lives.

It’s important too to celebrate the feast with the famine. I have a job where I work alongside a number of high school students, some as young as 16. I was speaking to a coworker a few weeks ago and he told me a long and dramatic story of how he had to break the screen out of his second-story bedroom window so he could sneak in a girlfriend. Thank the f**king lord that we’re past that period of our lives. Window screens cost too much.

We get to eat what we want, sleep where we want, buy what we want and work where we want. We can even get blind drunk on a Monday morning if we want to (I’m not recommending it). The beauty isn’t that we DO those things, however, but rather that we have the OPTION to do those things. For that glorious reason, however, the crippling weight of adult responsibilities comes along hand-in-hand. There can be no times of fat without times of lean.

So, the glory isn’t inebriating. But it’s there. It’s not overwhelming. But it’s not to be forgotten. With this time, we’re given a precious opportunity to fortify ourselves—to set the tone for the rest of our lives, and if we choose to belittle or entirely ignore that opportunity, we’re just reinforcing the idea that we’re a bunch of snot-nosed little whiners who are incapable of wiping our own asses.

We all have to wake up at ludicrously early hours and work too long. We all have to settle for one meal a day, hastily inhaled as we run to class. We all have to pay rent and medical bills and tuition and car payments.

We need to make a statement too. We need to prove that we’re capable of much more than wearing sweatpants, showing up to chemistry lab hungover and un-showered.