I Think About 'Adulthood'

       It looks like a clique, but it's not.

       It looks like a club, a collection of people who know things and do things and are a certain way that others can't put a finger on; but then suddenly you are on the other side of eighteen, or twenty-one, or twenty-five and you don't actually know those things or do those things or feel any different.

       You've graduated without having to pass the class, without realizing it was a class.

       You've felt the mantle drop over your head without ever proving you had the qualifications.

       You've gotten into the room, and realized that you actually just got out of one. This isn't the place where everyone knows and does and is a certain way. That was the place. That was blissful, ignorant childhood; and things that felt important but really weren't; and a few years of parental structure. This is a million choices, a billion outcomes, seven billion distinct universes that may or may not have anything in common. This is where people scramble to make sense of where/who/why they are, and what they are going to do in the decades that stretch before them.

       This is the real world.

       I read "coming of age" stories for fifteen years, and I never fully understood them. They are not about navigating something adult, like death or hardship; they are about seeing the world differently, as something that you are a part of. I guess that once you have experienced death, or love, or some other construct of these, you realize that you have touched the edges of human existence, that no adult has done any more, and that you have to make your own answers. You look up from yourself, and you see the world differently, as if you've passed through some barrier and are looking back. You realize that you are the world.

       Of course, not everyone goes to war or loves an ill-fated pet at just the right age for sudden illumination. Most people just get older, and then find themselves doing adult things, and then realize that if they want adulthood to be any different they are going to have to make it so themselves.

       I'm just going to have to make it so myself.