Sophia White-
I injured myself sleepwalking the other night, right around one in the morning. My sternum hit the post of my loft and caused a purplish, monster-colored bruise to appear below my chest the next morning. The following hours I was moved from health services to urgent care and spent over an hour waiting for an x-ray to tell me if I injured something during my fall. The one thing I was thinking about during this entire time was that I missed my mom. I wanted a hug, and I wanted her to tell me that everything would be okay. It was when I started to realize that the way my life functioned around other people was changing.
Adulting is terrifying. It’s hard to feel like things are okay when things like this happen during an already stressful transition. There have been over 100 times where I have wanted to drop everything and go home. I am responsible for myself only, so why not just give up on this idea of adulting altogether? Why would I want to stay afloat between student debt, school, and learning how to live with other people I do not know?
The truth about adulting is that no one is actually an adult. Even youth is a concept to keep young people from the workforce and the concept of adulting is that it is now socially acceptable for you to work and provide. The expectation of this is that you learn how to do taxes, get loans, acquire assets, learn how to take care of yourself, and be accomplished; all amalgamating for your life, career, or purpose.
Yet, that is not truly the nature of getting older. Getting older means you learn from the past, understand with a new awareness, and develop new social skills. At this point in young adulthood, it should not be about your future occupation, but about the relationships you create for the future that will support you in any decision you make. Learning how to create a life of your own with those new members in it will shape the home you have fostered. Adulting feels safe and truly freeing when you do it surrounded by people who make your home. Adulting is not about creating the physical home to put people (or a family) in, it is about creating that family for the home. And your family doesn’t have to be made up of a partner or children. This can be your college family. Who you surround yourself with will care for and love you within these next four years or onward into decades to come.
It is likely that, like me, you feel displaced from your home. I don’t know where my home is. I have not been at Gustavus long enough for this to feel like a home for me, but I know I’ll get there with the support of others who back all my dreams and aspirations. I’m talking about the metaphorical distinction of a home. A home is not a place. Home is where your pillars are made of relationships, not brick and cement. The feeling of home constitutes deeper feelings of joy and bliss than anything a physical house can make up.
Adulting is just developing that home over your lifetime.
If you are an introvert like me, this will feel like a daunting task. Some people so easily can make a home with others, but whether that home is strong or not is up to how deeply you dig into your foundations. You don’t need millions of people, just the strongest few in your world who will light you up and raise you up when things get difficult.
Life never truly goes how we expect it to. College certainly won’t either. The expectation of adulting is that you will have it all figured out, but we are in college. College is a time of exploration and discovery of oneself. Mistakes will be made and majors will be changed. The takeaway I want those who are dealing with the stressors of adulting to acknowledge is that it is completely valid to want to give up and feel frustrated by this phase in your life. But, what I want you to also consider is that the more moments you pause to recognize the space and the people around you, the more you will feel the freedom that comes with getting older. With life comes love and love is a good stress for us. Find the spaces that make adulting less daunting and build up your home from there. Make room for the baby steps. One of the things that I am going to start doing is going to sit out in the lounge to read, sketch, or do one of my hobbies and if someone comes to talk to me about it, then that is an easy way to start trying to make space for yourself somewhere. I am a person constantly worried about taking up space because I have never felt like anyone wanted me around. With adulting comes worry and anxiety, but I have learned that there is great significance in changing your mindset. Prioritize your happiness and your home by pushing yourself a little bit each day. It is not possible to create a friendship in a day, and if you put yourself in a space and make it your own, then people will naturally gravitate towards you.
A home needs space to develop, people as support, and love to keep steady. This part of adulting is truly the hardest part because people can be super awkward for no reason at all. But making those small steps forward can make all the difference in how people open up and come into themselves. We are all capable of building a home so try taking some baby steps that will make this whole adulting process way smoother for you and, likely, others as well.