We all know that phase in life where we’re considered adults but still googling how to cook perfect one-minute rice. You’re growing up; school is harder, feelings are more complicated, and all you want to do is be a kid again, where the biggest problem in your life is who you’re going to play with at recess. Growing up means it’s time to reinvent yourself while trying to give off the illusion of having yourself put together.
It’s time to find new hobbies, because continuously making origami ninja stars becomes less cute and more off-putting the older you get, new values, because you’re finally free from your parents’ influence, and new company. For most people, and for all of us at Stevens, it means uprooting the whole life you’ve built in your childhood home to live somewhere new. You need to be able to support yourself, like if your complicated metal shower rack with nine different rods breaks, you’re expected to figure out how to fix it. In order to support yourself, you need a job, but don’t let finding a job blind you from also trying to find an internship for the next summer. Personally, I’ve applied to about 15 different part-time jobs and 20 different internships in a month, and had no luck.
You’re going to have to meet a ton of new people as you move through life, and those people will either be an amazing addition to your life, or they will make you regret all of your actions up until meeting them. You might lose some friends from your past, or it will sure feel like you’re losing them, but you’re also going to make a ton of new friends (and it will be your job to evaluate them and decide if they’re really the kind of people you want to spend the rest of your adult years knowing). School is going to become 10 times harder, which is predictable, but so is just being alive. Life is a lot less forgiving the older you get, and you realize that life doesn’t give extra credit for your mistakes.
It can be exhausting when half your energy goes into pretending you can afford your groceries for that week, and the other half goes into convincing yourself that the piles of rejection emails aren’t personal, and the whole time you’re expected to just hold it all together. While the life of a young adult surely isn’t glamorous to experience, every day that you get through and every appointment you make without your mom calling for you is progress, and soon, maybe we’ll have this adulting thing figured out.
