Am I There Yet?: The Loop-de-loop, Zigzagging Journey to Adulthood

by Mari Andrew

Chapter 1 Overcoming Uncertainty Chapter

The road might feel crooked and long while you’re on it—perhaps you even create detours for yourself that prolong the journey, putting you far behind your friends.

we’re all a lot less alone than we think we are.

After I had worked there only a few weeks, the days felt meaningless and unending—like I had signed my life away to this job.

It didn’t feel like a season at the time; it felt like the rest of my life. That’s how most seasons feel while you’re living them, and then your surroundings transform just as you’re getting settled in.

The winter-to-spring shift is slow but dramatic, bringing with it a change of heart and wardrobe. The fall-to-winter transition is quick, taking place the very minute Santa Claus comes floating by at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. The end of summer is slower. This time of year is precious to everyone. It belongs to the soft cotton part of your heart that never ages past ten years old. You can smell it—fresh pencil shavings and cinnamon. Fall is a grieving period. It’s beautiful and magical and has its own dress code, but it’s a season all about loss. Even if you’re not sad to see summer go, fall is still heartbreaking, especially when rain sings through empty branches and leaves litter the ground like dusty garnets, waiting to be stuffed in black trash bags.

“If you stumble,” she said, “that’s a great sign. It means you found your edge. You tried something that didn’t work, and now you know.”

All too often, I was anxious to feel more settled, to have it figured out, to stop learning lessons and just reap the benefits of lessons learned. The most helpful way to get over this anxiety was to think about my life as a collection of seasons, rather than as individual steps. It’s tempting at this age to carry around a mental checklist of Things an Adult Should Have and a monthly report card with markings for each Life Category.

But it takes so much discipline to resist numbing oneself and skipping quickly to the next season.

It’s a lot easier to tell someone, “Things will get better,” “Look on the bright side,” or “Everything happens for a reason!,” rather than “I can’t imagine what you’re going through—I’m so sorry.”

Even the most die-hard winter-haters can probably find some beauty in a cold morning with hot coffee, and can appreciate that the inevitable return of summer makes those chilly mornings seem all the more cozy.

I said no to many alternate lives. I don’t obsess over them, but I do think about them from time to time. In fact, some day I would like to check in on these lives, then contentedly go back to my true life and enjoy all of it in its imperfect, surprising splendor.

The frustrating thing about making a choice is that you never know what the alternative would have been like;

Throughout my early twenties, I had been so anxious about finding my purpose, as though it were buried treasure that would be waiting for me if I followed the clues and happened upon the right place to start digging.

What I love most about living isn’t accomplishing things, but experiencing them.

They say saudade is unique to Portuguese, impossible to define in English. Nostalgia gets pretty close, but saudade is more complicated. It’s the remnant of gratitude and bliss that something happened, but the simultaneous devastation that it has gone and will never happen again. It marries the feelings of happy wistfulness and poignant melancholy, anticipation, and hopelessness. It’s universally understood by a cross-ocean culture with a constant feeling of absence, a yearning for the return of something now gone.

I am fully aware that my world could end tomorrow, which leaves me invigorated, but also more anxious. I am living intensely and quickly and productively and richly, but on the flip side, the sudden realization of mortality kept me up at night throughout my grieving process.

Mourners may not wear fancy head coverings when someone dies anymore, but we carry our own markings around on public transportation, at work, at our desks at home.

People want to believe that grief, like stubbing your toe, follows a crisp, orderly pattern, and that one day it’s done and nobody wants to talk about it or has to hear about it ever again.

Acceptance is not a relief; it’s the realization that you will always carry grief with you.

I’d have to go through this pain alone, and it was up to me to decide if it would make me weaker or stronger.

I quickly learned that choice is a luxury, and is largely responsible for pleasure.

Putting a wrinkle in my own self-imposed plan was freeing in a way I didn’t expect it to be. Because my life didn’t look at all how I thought it would, I was able to ditch the arbitrary adulthood checkboxes and go rogue, creating days and routines and a new set of priorities that I actually wanted.

When developing a personal style, it’s helpful to remember that you already have one.

Spend money on things you adore.

Lesson: It’s never wrong to do something kind.

The great gift of heartbreak, rejection, loss—of any challenge—is that it’s the impetus to stop hoping you’ll be happy someday and start making yourself happy now. Making yourself into an adult is this ongoing process of transforming your life experience into the person you’ve chosen to be. Keep experiencing, keep challenging yourself, and keep having fun!