“Adulting”

It’s cliché by now for affluent thirtysomethings like me to say we don’t feel like grown-ups.

I mean, I don’t. I teach university students who are usually between 18 and 21 years old, and my gut feeling is that I’m close to “their age.” It doesn’t help that my gender presentation tends to make me look younger than I am–I do occasionally get mistaken for a student. But the fact of the matter is, I don’t feel like I’ve changed a lot since I really was their age. I don’t feel less unsure, more knowledgeable, more responsible–any of the things that are supposed to distinguish the mature from the less-so.

Of course, I know that’s not true. I am very lucky to have had the opportunity to grow up, to grow older. And so I have changed. A lot.

But it’s tough to see in myself. It’s like the second half of The Neverending Story: once Bastian makes it to Fantasia, he trades his memories for new skills. The price of being strong is to forget how he used to be weak. The price of being beloved by all is to forget that he was lonely.

In some ways, I’ve defused my emotional memories in the same way as Bastian; I’ve written them into stories, installed them as engines to give life to characters. (What Freud would have called sublimation, though of course it wasn’t as neat as that label might imply.)

I do see the difference when I compare my present self to my students. The younger ones in particular need a lot of hand-holding and lack self-assurance in a way that sometimes baffles me, despite the fact that I objectively remember doing the same when I was at their stage of life.

Of course I remember starting every email with “Sorry to bother you, I hope it’s not a problem but…” for innocuous requests. I remember when a contract instructor from a different university put journal articles on hold for us at the library (gasp!) instead of having us buy a textbook, and how having to put in the effort to go there and find the texts seemed so arduous compared to our other courses.  Heck, I remember going to my 8:30am calculus class every single time despite the facts that: a) nobody took attendance; b) I sat in the back and worked on other projects; and c) I did well enough to be asked to be a TA the next year without ever paying attention to the lecture.

I remember all those things, but I can’t summon the feelings that went with them. I can understand intellectually why my students might apologize for being too sick to come to our workshop, because I would have done the same. But I can’t bring up the feeling of being actually sorry for happening to be sick. Somewhere in the intervening years, I learned that my health is important, and that I deserve to advocate for it.

It’s kind of like my writing. If you asked me whether my writing has developed in the last ten years, I’d say, of course not. I remember composing in pretty much the same style that I do now. There are one or two things I’ve learned–how dismissing the singular they on grammatical terms (or any others) is nonsense, for instance–but overall, it’d be hard for me to identify ways my style has changed.

Of course, it has. I like to think it’s improved, but whatever your opinion on that, if I click back to the start of this blog, or even to entries only a year or two old, I see such a big difference. It’s difficult to square with my memory of just being me, writing, the whole time, but evidence is evidence. The change was gradual, but I’ve definitely got better at plotting, at planning, at trying new things. I’ve grown out of the old writing patterns I used to lean on and shifted to new ones.

I’m reading different things. I’m writing different things. I’ve learned to go for the story I actually want to tell–the one about what it would be like to be a kid like William ought to have been on The X Files or Sherlock Holmes-y one where the female leads really do hook up–instead of what I think I’m “allowed” to tell or what other people will like.

And, honestly, I don’t understand how it happened, but somehow I went from squeamish about revision to ruthless. I’m not afraid to rip out the parts that aren’t working and try something completely different. I mean, I’m not thrilled about all that work, but I really am excited to make the story better and fix the draggy parts.

Because writing is still… there, even years after you’ve written it, I can compare what seemed like the early part of a static state to what seems like the latest part and find that, actually, there was continuous change. I can’t do that with my personality, not directly, but I can sort of see it when I have the privilege of reconnecting with friends I haven’t seen in a long time.

It’s a constant delight to me to see what wonderful mature people the friends I knew as young adults have become. I remember them (but not myself, not the same way) as unsure or insecure. Of course, I was too, and so were the friends I see more regularly, but familiarity blurs the memory. It’s so eye-opening to see, really see how we’ve grown.

We’ve started to see the positive qualities in ourselves that before we only saw in others. We advocate for our needs and set our boundaries with confidence. We’re–well, we’re the adults we see in each other, even if it doesn’t feel that way without the mirrors of friendship and memory.