Adulthood is about parenting yourself.

I confess I have fallen into the trap of following American influencers on Twitter. People who give you advice on how to grow your audience in just a year and quit civilization by living off coconut and caipirinha on an island. The main tip seems to be the need to find a niche on which to write and post every day. Well, the news is I am not going to find a niche nor I am going to force myself to write every day. Simply because writing is expansion, for me, I get a thrill from finding connections among different topics. And, because, the thoughts I have take sometimes a long time to form into words. Although I am frustrated that what I write isn’t reaching as many people as I’d like, writing, like life, for me, isn’t linear.

For that reason, today, I want to talk about adulthood. And by doing so sadly I have to give up on the 1M readers and that nice life in the Maldives that Josh from Tennessee was so kindly helping me to build. No, but seriously, what does it mean to be an adult? Is it age? Because I am almost 30 and I am absolutely hating my late 20s. It feels like that chairs game, where there are more people than chairs. I live these years with the constant fear that I have to capture everything, I have to stay constantly alert to get the signals in fear at some point I’ll find myself with nowhere to sit down. The result is that I am so tired that even if someone were to put the chair under my ass I’d miss it probably anyway. Will there ever be an age that will suddenly mark this transformation into an adult? I doubt it because I have seen people older than me acting like kids, being petty and spoilt.

I am sure, so many of my peers, try to brush off the fear of ending up being the ones with no chair left by “acquiring” adulthood with some milestone events. For some, it is buying a car or a house, for some a child, for some a marriage, and for the more advanced all of the above. And truth is that all the above are markers of adulthood: if you fail to pay instalments it is you filing for bankruptcy and nobody else, that kid as well is quite irreversible and that divorce is expensive too. As such, adulthood can be seen as a bunch of papers that legally bind you and make you responsible for some material possessions. Those milestones become an armour you put on to prove that you are an adult. But some of these decisions are rushed and a mistake precisely because you are trying to pretend to be something you are not, yet.

I have asked myself if I am an adult myself. And when did it start? I immediately thought of the first time I opened a bank account and I had to sign countless papers. But then, I pushed myself to go deeper and I think being an adult started only this year. And adulthood was marked by a new habit: I started acting as if I was my own parent. It had never occurred to me before how beneficial that would be. I was too busy blaming my own parents for everything. But once I started thinking like a parent to myself things got better. My day goes by with a lot of questions. Would I give my kid pasta for two meals in a row in a day? Would I allow my kid to stick around these people? Would I let my kids skip any physical movement? Would I allow them to drink 6 coffees per day? Would I let them live in such a mess? Would I like them to date this guy who has no clue what he wants from her?

If you ask yourself why someone should get into this crazy habit, it is for two main reasons. First, because we tend to give the best advice to others and some of us do not hold ourselves as our first priority. There has been a period before arriving at the parenting self though where I thought taking care of myself meant literally pampering myself. I thought care equalled self-care. That was wrong as well: face masks, a new dress, a nice dinner. Do not get me wrong, that is part of the equation but an infinitesimal part of it. Because if you keep missing all the parts where you have to act with responsibility and accountability, you will fuck up and have always decreased chances of pampering yourself. I suspect the Belgian financial administration has an altar with my picture, to thank me for the additional fees I used to pay because I was always late with my declarations. God knows how miserable I would feel while eating a self-care gelato knowing that with the money I just paid for my avoidance of responsibility, I could have bought stocks of Ben&Jerry. Turns out, adulthood means embracing accountability and responsibility, with the ultimate objective of making your life easier. Not an avoid of these two.

The second reason is that if you start parenting yourself, you understand how damn hard that is. And, if you are consistent enough with this effort, you might transform rage and resentment against your parents into compassion. They didn’t know better but you do. Or at least you try to. And that’s the most empowering process I have ever personally embarked on. Things depend on me now. When you act as a child that can scare you, when you act as an adult that can only be a relief.

Seerut K. Chawla (@seerutkchawla)

I frankly see very few adults around me. The culture of victimisation is pervasive. Trauma culture as well. The grievance is all around us. Makes you wonder why my generation is stuck in a process that they vaguely call “healing” but there is no mention of the agency they carry. Trauma and victim culture love to remind us that we did nothing wrong but skip the part where they tell us how to be heroes of our own stories. Emotions don’t seem to be a valuable conductor to adulthood, responsibility instead, in comparison, is a Ferrari driver.

Vilma Djala