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

by Mari Andrew

“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.

When asked to describe loss, this guy said that it was like having the casino cashier gone. He compared everything that happened to him—any happiness, any difficulty, any mundanity—to a poker chip, saying his father would validate those experiences like a cashier, making them worth something. His father turned every one of the man’s moments into something meaningful just by listening to his stories.

And the activities in San Francisco were also out of the ordinary to me in just about every way. For example, I went hiking. Listen, it takes a lot to get me hiking. Like, you basically have to drag along an entire pot of coffee and a bagel the size of my face and promise me dessert afterward. So I went hiking, and lo and behold, I ended up discovering the activity’s benefits. Mainly, if you start walking the lush, crooked trails of Mount Tamalpais early enough, the fog below peels back and reveals the ocean right when you get to the top. At first you can’t even tell it’s water; it looks like a solid sheet of cobalt stone all the way down at the bottom of the slopes. That is, until the sun finds its way through the fog to the waves. My San Franciscan love interest asked me if the view had been worth it; I said yes. Very, very much so.

This was the first time it occurred to me that I was not immortal, and the first time I realized just how much I enjoyed living. Not because of triumphs and trophies, but because of things like pressing elevator buttons, wearing a sweatshirt and making pancakes on Christmas morning, finding a seat on a crowded subway, reading on trains, whispering when there was no need to, and watching a cat clean his ears with his paw.

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

I’ve decided a tombstone that reads “Here lies Mari: She enjoyed herself” would be an extraordinarily fortunate accomplishment. From now on, my life lived will be my life’s work.

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.

But any time of day besides the sunset, I recognized how much happier I was to be single, with every freedom belonging only to me. I thought about how well this freedom suited both my spontaneous whims and long-term desires, and I questioned, as I’ve been questioning for a long day, if I’m cut out for a relationship. I love to spend time alone, I love to travel by myself, I love the possibility of romantically connecting with a new beautiful soul at any given moment. How disappointed I would be to have to turn down, say, a Spanish guitarist.

People are so uncomfortable with the lack of a point to life that almost every religion has a belief in a higher plan for each person’s existence. Even people who eschew religion may instead put their faith in astrology or the universe, attempting to make sense of rejection as something that “wasn’t meant to be,” and something that paves the way for “something better to take its place.” It’s a comforting thought until you get tied up in the logic that the universe’s plan has failed plenty of people.

When I turned twenty-nine, I realized with a laugh that I had missed my marriage deadline. 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. I was no longer borrowing coolness from Alejandro or envying lifestyles that felt out of my reach; I was too happy with mine even to care.

I can’t travel every day, but I can fill my home with things that simulate that same sense of wonder, curiosity, and cheerfulness that I get when I’m visiting a new place.

“I think I’m a condor.” I disrupted the silence a little too earnestly. I liked the idea of a creature whose features didn’t make sense on land but all came together for a majestic flight. I felt like so many of my insecurities went away when I traveled, and the things I’m most self-conscious about became things that helped me be a better traveler.

I strengthened into a different version of myself. I had new muscles, a new way of moving in the world. My creativity and resilience and courage had grown. All this growth made me feel worthy of a new kind of romantic love—one in which I was far less concerned about whether I was worthy of a man and much more interested in his worthiness of me.

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

You may not always have the same friends or same relationship you have now, but you’ll always be with you. As a new adult, now’s the time to become the person you want to live with for the rest of your life.

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!