Becoming An Adult

Consulting life can get old fast. You start living between airports and hotels; you start smiling at strangers hoping to make a friend; you start living for the weekends. It is in this limbo that I’ve come to appreciate and almost idolize the friendships that I made in college and in DC, where I lived for a brief stint. These are the friendships that will define my life, my happiness and will motivate me to keep working maddening hours during the week.

My dad once told me that after a certain age, we just make ‘Friendships of Convenience’. As unapologetic and jaded as that sounds, I think we’ve all been there. We’ve all dealt with people that front friendship and then talk behind our backs. How many people do we fall back on for emotional support? An embarrassing few. And how many of those genuinely care about helping you? Even less. But to learn to accept that and be okay with it is part of growing up.  After all, we were born alone and we are going to die alone. Cue existential meltdown.

One of my favorite Calvin and Hobbes strip addresses the bleakness that comes with becoming an adult.

Funny how the term ‘adult’ can have different connotations: you are an adult if you are a responsible, Samaritan citizen who pays her bills on time…unless you’re going to the movies, in which case you’re an adult if you like gory violence and copious amounts of sex.  

All in all though, being an adult is no fun. I was much better at being a baby. Babies have to live up to such incredibly low standards that it makes for a great life. You yell for an entire day, poop in your pants, eat dirt, puke on everyone and, somehow, people are okay with it.

But now that you’re an adult, you may have a great family, a great job, good friends and all the basic necessities, but are you successful? And if so, by whose standards? Life will repeatedly put a fork in the road and ask you if you’re lacking in some intrinsic way. You can either make peace with yourself or you can let your insecurities destroy the very things that have made a positive impact on your life. It’s surprising how many people opt for the latter.

And on that note, I’ll end with the thought that I never thought I’d become a blogger. I wondered who had enough time and ego to maintain a regular blog. But, often, it comes down to simply being able to share my thoughts with others.

Blogging is a simple solution to telling everybody I care about something and I want to talk about it. And as alienating as life can be, the internet is a great tool to connect with people. From the initial reluctant click on somebody’s blog to the ugly realization that you’ve just wasted four hours surfing the net and it’s 3 am and you have work tomorrow, know that you’re not alone. We’ve all been disgruntled because the world has held up certain standards of being an adult, and we’ve all failed to live up to it in more ways than one. But it’s okay: because as you yell and cry at the world, poop in your pants, eat shit and puke on everybody, if you find even one person who is willing to stay with you through this, you’ve made it.