Growing Up Happens

Don't let anyone fool you: you don't magically become an adult at 18.  Anyone who's 19 understands that, anyone who's 24 laughs at that, and anyone who's 17 distinctly hopes it's not true.  But if you're 18 around a bunch of 21 year-olds, you feel the same as you did at 15.  And when you're a 21 year old on just any normal day, it feels an awful lot similar to 20, which in turn always feels like 19, but with added amounts of confusion.

Your friends will be getting married while your other friends talk about how ridiculous it is to get married at this age and while other friends talk about never wanting to get married at all.  In fact, you'll probably never heard a friend of yours say, “I want to get married” when they weren't already engaged.  And then these people who previously never mentioned marriage all of a sudden come back from a vacation saying they proposed and the other said yes and they're either setting a date or just going to wait until graduation but they'll still be engaged.

And these things won't make sense because you don't really want to think about the fact that you're an adult, because you never felt like an adult and nobody ever walked up to you on your 18th birthday and handed you your Adult League Membership Card. Maybe you expected it would come with confirmation of your Selective Service registry.  Be glad it didn't.

But if and when it does happen that you find yourself to be considered an adult in the eyes of the law, the change is subtle.  Of course you'll start getting credit card offers and bills and things that are responsibilities and all.  But those won't feel like tickets into adulthood.  Those will feel like things they threw at you when you weren't looking and they expect you to deal with them even though you're still pretty sure you've only been alive a little more than a decade.

No, the clues to adulthood are different.  Like meeting friends to hang out and ending up talking rather than seeing a movie or playing video games.  Not that you'll stop seeing movies or playing video games – adult life without movies or games is no life at all.  But you'll realize that the people you know are suddenly so much more interesting than they used to be.  They'll have things to say.  They'll listen to things you'll have to say.  You'll stop just talking at people and start conversing with people.

And you'll love it, hopefully.  You'll find that people are, as a whole, so much more interesting and so much less of a waste than you thought they were when you were a kid.  You'll stop saying that everyone sucks and start noticing that there are some people that genuinely interest you.  And you'll find out that you can surround yourself with these people.  Yes, you can be around people you want to be around.  And anyone over 30 will tell you this isn't news and that that's not really a revelation, but you'll know that it's groundbreaking, and it was probably groundbreaking for them when they first figured it out.

That's not to say you'll like everybody.  There will always be jerks.  That's not to say everybody will be interesting.  There will always be genuine bores.  But you'll find that most people generally are less awful than you assumed they were as a teenager.  And those people will realize it too.  And this won't be accompanied by bells on the hill or a five piece jazz combo playing Come Fly With Me, but it will be no less important.  You'll figure it out in the middle of a five-hour-long conversation that should have ended two hours ago because you are all so unbelievably tired but you won't stop talking because this whole discussion thing is just way too much fun to stop.

Maybe.  I hope.  Because if I just spent the past 600 words completely generalizing a reaction that you'll never have, I'll look like an idiot.  But I honestly do hope this is what happens, because the moment that you realize that being an adult is actually really cool is a spectacular moment.  And someone like you deserves that feeling.