I officially realised I was an adult when the old school ‘Happy Eater’ restaurants, that you used to stop at on long car journeys stopped giving me a lollipop. It was a hard realisation. Because as soon as that happened, I began to notice the world around me redefining my identity. There were the fewer smiles, the greater expectations, the lack of acknowledgement for burdens that you have to bear though they are not necessarily yours. And as I grew, the more I found this to be the case. When you are a child you can truly believe that life should be fair, that people should be nice and that you have a place in the world. As you move to adulthood, those realisations fall away with what Jung called ‘the first death’. And honestly, it hurts. Adulthood requires you to operate despite unfairness in the world and despite the fact that you may not have a designated space in that world and your 20’s and 30’s can feel heavy as a result. But with effort, with reflection and time you start to realise that you can find your world inside yourself, you can create a fair system that works in the parts of your psyche. You cannot remove suffering, but you can alter your experience of it. So what starts with the withholding of a lollipop feels like a rather dark journey until I found that after that first death, I could be reborn again.
When did you realise you were officially an adult?
Daily writing prompt
What’s a moment when you realized you were officially an adult?