On Being a Grownup

“Mature for your age” is what I’ve always been told. Ever since I was little, perhaps because I have older siblings, I’ve been told how grown-up I am. As a child, all I wanted was to be a fully-fledged adult, which meant going to work everyday in “clippy-cloppy” (high-heeled) shoes , and having a magic credit card with which I could buy any Sylvanian family I wanted. Clearly, like any young child, my understanding of adulthood was somewhat skewed (I hate wearing heels and my Sylvanian’s have since relocated to the charity shops, RIP). Additionally however, I viewed adulthood as commencing at around 18 and really reaching its peak at about 21, by which point I imagined I would be happily married with four kids (my childhood aspirations were evidently influenced heavily by the uninspiring tales of blonde princesses stuck in towers awaiting their male suitors).

I believe I have carried this, albeit false, sense of maturity into my twenties, and I often find myself feeling, with a healthy dose of arrogance, that I really do know what I’m doing; life can throw at me what it wants and I’ll be just fine. “How naive” I imagine any reader over the age of 21 will be thinking, recalling themselves at 21 and how maybe they too thought they knew it all. However, I have recently been made aware of something very shocking; as hard as it is to believe, your twenties aren’t actually a very grown up decade at all. Watching interviews with celebrities and reading about characters in books, I have noticed how the language used to reminisce about their twenties is similar to the way in which I recall my pre-teen years: inexperienced and undeveloped. When this dialogue first entered my conscience, I was shocked, and I felt betrayed by my supposedly secure sense of self.

But with each of the various celeb interviewees I’ve heard chuckle over the heartbreaks and hangovers of their twenties, I’ve begun to find comfort in the distant way in which they view themselves at that time. Being in your twenties can be so difficult to navigate, one minute you feel as if everything’s going okay and you just might actually know what you’re doing, and the next you’re questioning how on earth the “real” grownups do it when you can’t afford a Tesco meal deal for lunch (or you’re too hungover to even walk to Tesco). Having felt pressure from both myself and others, to be “sorted,” I have found comfort in hearing people reminisce about their twenties as a time of youthful mistakes and justifiable naivety. This enables for a degree of error which I had not previously been allowing myself.

I imagine this so-called revelation is not all that groundbreaking. However, my very recent realisation of how far I still have to go is, in itself, proof of my naivety; how unrealistic of me to have even considered that I may be a grown-up. Because maybe we haven’t actually come too far from stomping around in our mums’ too-big heeled shoes; in other words, we’re still playing at being grownups.

talking into my pink, plastic makeup phone.