You are an adult. Congratulations, you’ve crossed that magical finish line by simply turning another year older. You’re 18, you’re legal, you’re probably about to go to college. Do you have any concept of what it means to be an adult? I didn’t. Not at 18, not growing up in the small “all-American village”, in a middle-class white family in America. I went to school from 8-3, did sports until 5, did homework, hung out with friends. Parents cooked me dinner, paid our mortgage, utilities, groceries, kept up our house, worked 5 days a week, insisted on family dinners. I was 18, but I was still a child.
You are an adult. Congratulations, you’re no longer now a teenager. Twenty. The word that is heavy with connotations of adulthood, from an America that perhaps no longer exists. The American dream: to be on the fast track to a career, dating someone seriously, starting to think about settling down and raising a family. “To be in your twenties”–it implies a sort of independence and a transition into the “real world”.
You are an adult. Congratulations, you’re 22 and have just graduated college. Post-grad life. You’re a 20-something in a society struggling with finances, with employment, with overqualified people working at underpaying jobs. So you’ve got your BA. Congratulations, so do thousands of other 20-somethings who are pouring out of the floodgates of colleges all around the USA. Everyone has a college degree these days. Holy shit, you think. What the hell am I doing with my life? Chances are, you’ve moved back in with your parents. You’re job hunting, working a minimum wage job on the side, watching all your younger friends return to college–to parties, to friendships, to classes, to stability. Maybe that’s what you miss most of all: the stability. This is not every 20-something post-grad, but it’s a reality for many. This is the reality for this new generation of 20-something year old Americans. Society says we should be settling down, getting paid, getting married, having children. The American dream trundles on in the subconscious of our society. I think it’s time to create our own reality.
I have two years left of college, for which I am incredibly thankful. I need the time. My father once said that college buys you time, more than anything else. But I also have a lot of older friends, who I’ve watched make the transition–or who are currently making the transition–to what I jokingly call the “glamour of post-grad life”. It’s damn hard, these days. There are the rare success stories, that everyone gripes about, secretly wishing they were that lucky success story, but it doesn’t seem to be very common. We are fighting our way upstream. I hate to sound bleak, but here it is. We need to be more patient with ourselves. We are 20-somethings. The world is our oyster; we are still so young. Horizons are still opening up and spreading out for us. We are mobile, we aren’t in a fixed career yet, we have that freedom to choose, to walk away from what everyone thinks we should be doing. So what if you’re a 20-something and single? You haven’t failed in a duty, expectation, or social norm. Twenty years old and that’s all I’ve ever known, and there are days when I don’t know if I could fit another person into my 21st century feminist mayhem of a life. Live up the single life. You’ll find someone, but you’ll find that someone when it’s right for you, not when you feel like you should be finding them, because society tilts its nosy head and asks why you aren’t in a long-term relationship with a ring on your finger yet. Hold up there. So what if you’re a 20-something and haven’t found a job yet? Money is good. Money is excellent and money drives most of our decisions and actions in this society. Yeah, yeah. The Class of 2012 graduated 4 months ago. Goddamn if you’ve found a job in four months. My father, 20 years ago, with a PhD. searched for over a year, before finding employment. It’s tough. You gotta fight. And you will, because you’re a millennial. We grew up with gadgets. We’re resourceful. We bounce from change to change like we’re switching lanes on an open highway. We’re adaptive, we’re entitled and maybe a little narcissistic sometimes, but we know what we want. We know what we think we deserve and we know we’re going to get it. Who can slam a little positive outlook? The trend for millenials has suggested a more liberal worldview, an emphasis on being a team-player, and a more global outlook. Hello Skype, Facebook, Twitter: you’ve connected the globe. We message with people halfway across the world. We learn to depend on others. We’re millennials. We’ll figure it out. We’ll make our own jobs if we have to. So what if you don’t have your shit together? I bought a book called “Adulting: How to Become a Grown-Up in 468 Easy(ish) Steps” by Kelly Williams Brown. (It’s a phenomenal book, I highly recommend it.) Brown titles one chapter “Fake It Til You Make It”, which I think is pretty accurate. No one really has their shit together, some are just better at faking it than others. I am the consummate “has her shit together” girl and had a complete meltdown last week in my bed because I was suddenly super terrified about never getting an internship and burning out into nothing. I told a friend earlier this week that I’m pretty sure my life is in a constant state of chaos and mayhem. I do a pretty good job of keeping the chaos and mayhem secret from everyone else. I’m just better at faking my shit. That’s all it is.
If society says that if you’re a 20-something and need to be on a career path, seriously dating, and thinking about settling down with all your shit together, society needs to a) take a good hard look at the reality surrounding us in 2013, and b) go fuck itself really hard, because that’s not how this works anymore. We’re redefining adulthood, what it means to be an adult, what it means to be a man or a woman, and what we can do with a college degree. In the 1980’s, when a lot of our parents were entering college, the average college enrollment was about 12,000. This year, the estimation was a little under 22,000. (Statista.com) That’s almost doubled in numbers. (Granted, yes, we also do have a bigger population than in 1980, but the trend has definitely shifted towards the “graduate high school, enter college, that’s just what everyone does” mindset, in middle-class, white America.) So many of us don’t know the first thing about banking, buying a car, signing a mortgage, taking out loans for various things–actually, many of us, myself included, don’t even have a credit score–paying bills, doing our taxes, etc. All the things that as “adults”, we’re supposed to know how to do. Of course, I’m generalizing. My parents were sticklers about me managing my own bank account and managing bills. I do, however, still go run and whine to my dad every April about taxes.
We’re adults trying to figure out how to be adults, what that even means. We’re getting there, but the world isn’t making it easy right now. Not one single person has the right answer or even an answer. So dear 20-somethings of the world, please stop beating yourself up. Please don’t feel like you should be somewhere you’re not, like you’re failing because you’ve moved back home, and are trying to figure out what’s next. And please don’t think this is forever, because, dear 20-somethings? I don’t know if anyone’s ever told you, but we’re the next generation. We’ve got this world in our hands and we’re gonna shake things up.
The Wanderer 