Bucket List #17 Learn to Adult
When we are young, we look at our parents and teachers and think that they have figured it all out. They have some secret to life that we will one day come to learn.
"You'll understand when you're older."
We think that there is a certain age that you turn where suddenly things just make sense and you have all the knowledge to make the right choices.
Then you grow up and realize that there's no such thing as an adult.
You can do "adult things" like pay bills, have a job, buy a house, get married, have kids, do all the things that you watched your parents do, but if you are waiting for that moment where you stop making mistakes and completely have your shit together, you're going to be waiting forever.
I used to look at married couples, the ones who look so perfect, and think that they must have all the secrets of having a happy, healthy relationship figured out. I thought that getting older meant you just learn how to do those things. Then you grow up and see your friends getting married and having kids who still down glasses of wine and cry about how they don't know what they're doing.
We are all just faking it and then posting the half of our lives that we do have together on social media so that everyone else thinks we know what the hell were doing.
That couple who just posted their perfect getaway holding hands #blessed, #bae, had a screaming fight 3 hours later over parallel parking the car. The girl who left her job to travel the world and makes you envy her life with every hipster Instagram pic, is over her head in credit card debt. The guy who keeps getting promoted and seems to have the career you would die for, is so lonely that he fills it with those ambitions.
There are times I look at my own social media presence and think, "That doesn't tell the whole story at all." Pictures from days and nights that started great and ended in mistakes and regrets that no one sees behind an Instagram filter. But no one wants the world to see that side of their story.
Everyone has something in their lives that isn't perfect and we all screw up. That doesn't mean that you're doing life wrong, because I assure you that no one's doing it exactly right.
So maybe that's what it means to call yourself an "adult." Admitting that you have no idea what you're talking about and that you're just figuring it out as you go.
So here's to all you "adults" out there faking it like me, know that we're fucking up together.
Cheers.