Being An Adult

[rainydiary]

I reflected a bit in my journal about how I don't feel like an adult.  A fellow community member asked me some follow up questions that seemed like it might be supportive to open up to the community.

The questions they posed to me were what would make me feel more like an adult or what do I see as an adult?

I do think I am really influenced by culture as well as harmful systems about what makes an adult.  When I hear the word adult I see someone with a professional job, a family, a car, has a lot of answers, seems confident, has a lot of friends, owns a home, is involved in the community.

Very few of those things apply to my life.  I also don't actually believe those are things that make someone an adult.  They are really influenced by a lot of "isms" that keep us stuck. 

I think what I would like to be is someone that responds versus reacts, feels joy, feels comfortable with myself, sets boundaries. 

I can do those things when working with students on my caseload or children in general. 

But it falls apart when I speak to many other adults.  I don't see myself as an adult with many people especially with men and people in positions of authority.  I still don't think I've gotten over the dynamic of my parents (especially my dad) looming over me and losing it. 

I also have been able to do those "dream" things with a few adults.  What they have in common is they communicate directly, are open to hearing my perspective, are mostly honest and upfront with me, and our relationship feels two ways.  No one is perfect and the folks that fall into this category also caused me harm.  But I think that we could have talked about it and worked through it.

It is interesting how I am getting caught up in the a very specific and biased image versus actions of an adult.  I don't fit the image I described and this makes me feel like my version of adulthood doesn't count.  I also haven't fully found my way to work with or through my feelings of how small my parents made me feel. 

[woodsgnome]

Thanks for sharing your heart-filled view of the trip to adulthood, raindydiary. Lots of deep reflections, but concluding with perhaps the crucial element -- the lack of an even-handed parental presence, i.e. a lack of maturity on their part. So how could you have been expected to comfortably progress with that sort of image?

In my life, I had the same bad sorts of characters called adults. Asked what I wanted to be when 'grown up' my first reaction was: Nothing if 'adulthood' means being like what I saw of  almost all the adults around me. From FOO to the teachers at religious (or so they said -- good cover for abusers!) schools, I had horrible immediate examples of 'adults' and from what I saw of the world beyond them, more of the same.

I guess the word in this mix could be mature -- to me adults lacked the very maturity that they always yapped on about. This counter-example to maturity made me mostly not care -- all that I knew was I never want to be like them. So it kind of cancelled the ideal of being called grown-up. Says who? Only 'they' do, and now I'm safe without 'them'.

Best wishes for you as you continue sorting this out and trying to find some peace out of the senseless world we're all still emerging from.

[Hope67]

Hi Rainydiary,
Thanks for opening this thread about Being an Adult.  I thought about this and wrote something about it - I'll copy and paste it here, as I already wrote it in my journal:

Being An Adult

"I relate very much to this issue, in terms of sometimes feeling as if I am a child, and not an adult.  This can happen in the forum, as well as in day to day interactions and relationships.  I can feel small and powerless, and I can feel as if others are discussing things rationally with their adult heads on, and I don't feel the same.
When I think back to my childhood, I was literally the smallest being in the household – I used to sit on a tiny foot stool a lot of the time and everyone made decisions around me, as if I didn't really have any say in the matter.  Although they did claim to include me in decisions, but I didn't really think it through that they would be able to make the deciding action happen, as they could always outvote me, or talk me out of something.
I think that being dissociated might mean I've not been able to keep up with things that other adults might be interested in – for example I rarely paid attention to world events in my teens and twenties and even thirties.  I do pay more attention to those things now, and I am impacted by what is going on – realising how horrific some situations are currently, and wishing for world peace and harmony.  I do care about these things more now, whereas before maybe I was just distracted and unable to focus.
I do many of the things that are adult things, but I suspect that never being a parent hasn't helped me to feel what it's like to be responsible for another person.  If I'd had children, I think I'd have faced many situations and would know how those things felt.
Yet even as I consider these things, I wonder whether others feel 'adult-like' in their daily lives – maybe we all just feel quite young and vulnerable inside, and secretly hope that someone will come along and sort things out for us.
I am mindful of the fact that I have been quite self-reliant whilst I was a child, and that inside my head at that age, I probably felt quite grown-up – as if I was a mini-adult then.  So essentially it's not really a difference for me now – I'm just someone with an older body, bigger now than I was then, and I'm still feeling pretty much the same.
So now I feel a bit confused about it.  But I was glad to think about this for a while today – and glad to have written something."

Rainydiary - thanks for writing about this topic, it's thought-provoking and I've found it helpful to see what you and Woodsgnome wrote here so far.

Hope 

[rainydiary]

Thanks Woodsgnome and Hope.

Another thing came to mind which is a different track -

I remember being 12 years old and was in the locker room at my local pool.  I was on swim team and was involved at the pool.  A person in the locker room and I spoke one day and she asked me if I was in the military.  I said, No I am 12 years old.

I also had two different people I made friends with in two different states tell me that of all of their friends their parents (whom I had never met) liked me the best.  I took this to mean because I wasn't a troublemaker and was very academic focused.

When I was young I was really bothered by how grown up other people found me.  I think I felt like I had to act more grown up for a variety of reasons and I never really stopped feeling like I was little.

Now I feel like I am also experiencing a reversal.  I spoke with a colleague at work and we found out that we lived in a similar area in Germany (her as a teacher and me as a student).  She asked me when I lived there and when I told her, she was surprised at how old I am.  She thought I was 12 years younger than I am. 

I am trying to bring awareness to my thoughts and conversation around age as there is discrimination and challenge with how age is perceived.  But I think this makes "adulthood" feel even more muddled to me.

[Armee]

I've been wanting to add my thoughts but haven't had a chance to gather them yet. Thank you for starting this thread, Rainy. 💛

[Kizzie]

I don't see myself as an adult with many people especially with men and people in positions of authority.  I still don't think I've gotten over the dynamic of my parents (especially my dad) looming over me and losing it.

This is exactly how abusive people in our lives wanted us to feel - cowed, small and afraid and it sticks sadly. I'm able to adult quite well until something/one triggers me in a certain way and then my adult goes offline. 

I never quite realized this was what happens but talking with my T recently I put it into words finally. "My adult goes offline" really describes what it feels like.  I'm not sure where we'll go with this in terms of getting over/past it but wanted to let you know I have a similar issue/reaction. 

I sense that a part of recovery does involve being kind and gentle with the young parts of ourselves who  had to hide themselves by acting grownup. Maybe we need to become a bit more fierce and self-protective so we can feel comfortable being our playful, silly selves from time to time, I don't know.   We'll see.

Good thread.       

[Bach]

I've been struggling with this question for a long time.  I always think that I would feel more like an adult if I could do "normal" things like keep my house tidy and organised, and work without my job being piggybacked onto my husband's and supervised by him.  My husband taught me his trade and this is the only way I have been able to work for the past many years.  I cannot even get work independently, and although he gets work for me whenever he possibly can, he is a freelancer and cannot always find jobs that have room for me.  This adds to my difficulty perceiving myself as an adult, because it feels a lot like being a child going to work with Daddy and being given tasks that may be legitimately helpful but aren't a "real job".  It doesn't really help that I have legitimate talent and skills for this trade, even though perhaps it should.  And I don't even know whether being able to do those things would make me feel like an adult or not, because I've never been able to keep my house tidy and organised, and I haven't been able to work in any kind of traditional job situation since 1996. 

I am mindful of the fact that I have been quite self-reliant whilst I was a child, and that inside my head at that age, I probably felt quite grown-up – as if I was a mini-adult then.  So essentially it's not really a difference for me now – I'm just someone with an older body, bigger now than I was then, and I'm still feeling pretty much the same.

I feel this way, too.  During my recent experiences with buying a house, selling a house, and moving, I had some moments when I felt very competent, and even at least a little bit like an "adult".  Indeed, for various reasons that have to do with its layout, decor and location, my new house seems a lot more inherently like a house an "adult" would live in than my old house did.  My old house felt more like a house that would be shared by college students.  Even though I was reminding myself from very early on that I must not expect a new and different house to make me feel like a new or different Bach, I think some part of me did believe that the process would get me further along the path of adulthood.  There were a lot of things about the way I was living in my old house that weren't particularly comfortable, but they were discomforts that were familiar and in a weird way they were comfortable.  Certainly much easier to live with than to try to change.  So I thought that in a new house, a completely different house that would require different paradigms, I could start over, "do things differently".  I haven't entirely given up on that idea but it's a lot harder than it sounds, and now I feel even more hopelessly like a child than ever. 

[Armee]

It's been really interesting to read what people wrote because I had completely forgotten that I was always considered mature for my age, a little adult in a kid's body. It's interesting we all seem to have had that experience of being mature for our age but now feel like not-adults.

On the outside looking in most people would think I'm very adult. I have two kids, had a career, own a home in fancy town, quickly dealt with my mom's estate when she died etc. But I am only an adult because my husband pulls me along. In reality I don't know how to buy a car, my bills are chronically late, I mentally can't deal with balancing checkbooks etc. I often feel like a little kid in an adult body. I've had a very very strange experience when some of the trauma was resurfacing more insistently of being curled up next to my 9year old and feeling physically and emotionally like I was the child. It was disconcerting.