Barely Functional Adult: It’ll All Make Sense Eventually

by Meichi Ng

It was the kind of gift that might have felt like junk to someone else, but to me, it was a reminder that she fundamentally understood who I was as a person.

But the problem with daydreaming about parallel-universe narratives is that you can never be certain how great alternate timelines would have played out. Would normalcy really have been that wonderful? Or would it have been unbearably dull?

something tells me that life has a habit of never quite panning out as planned. It’s fickle, it’s messy, and sometimes there are frog rectal explosions. You just gotta roll with it.

When Gum told me, “I’ll love you forever,” I believed it. Because when your first love tells you they love you, there’s no reason to doubt it. And when I responded, “I’ll love you forever too,” I meant it in equal measure.

When you first break up, your friends are there for you. They’re there because they love you, and more importantly, they’re there because they need to talk shit about your ex and this is the window of opportunity they’ve been patiently waiting for.

Nobody chooses to be stuck on someone. They just are.

Some people are best left in our memories.

But the truth is, some people just stick. Maybe they were there for your formative years. Maybe they played a significant part in your story. Or maybe you still care simply because you’re just fundamentally someone who cares. There are worse things to be.

And in each past self, we loved and cared for different people. People who, for better or for worse, became the groundwork for our future selves. And although we evolve into older and wiser versions of ourselves in time, I don’t think we ever lose those past selves. I don’t think we ever really forget the people we once loved.

I’ve since taken up the habit of holding on to three good memories for every person who has played a significant part in my life.

My understanding of “moving on” has shifted substantially over the years. I no longer consider moving on to be synonymous with not caring. I think it’s more complex than that. I think moving on is about allowing ourselves to remember the good and the bad, to distinguish the past from the present, and to accept who we are, who we were, and everyone we met along the way.

Never ask a new grad if they have any jobs lined up. It’s sort of mean—it’s like asking someone who was recently fired when they think they’ll get promoted. Life is stressful enough without foolish questions.

My tears are to be saved for sad movies—not sad managers, I reminded myself.

For the record, only an idiot doesn’t negotiate their pay.

The whole adage of “do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life” is fallacious baloney.

It’s a lot to ask of ourselves, to know without a doubt what field we want to study, what career we want, and to essentially write out the script for the rest of our lives at the very start of it. So it should come as no surprise to us that sometimes when we look back at the script we once wrote, we realize we were completely off the mark.

think there’s value in knowing when to call it, in knowing when to get up and leave, in knowing when we’re done—even if it means having to walk out into the unknown to start all over again.

I’d like to make a quick note about therapy. The decision to go to therapy is much like the decision to pet a flower you find on the side of the road—it’s a choice, and that choice is entirely up to you.

Therapy made me experience what it’s like to be emotionally peeled back. With every word I spoke, I exposed new, unseen layers of myself. It was a process that was at once liberating and terrifying. Throughout the session, I could hear a voice I recognized as my own saying things I didn’t realize I felt until I heard them articulated—things I instantly knew to be true once said out loud.

Therapy was scary, but in a way that seemed worthwhile. It allowed me to process and relive my stories with clarity and objectivity, like I was reading a book for the first time.

Maybe therapy isn’t about fixing things, but accepting them as they are—broken and imperfect, sure, but still worthwhile and beautiful in their own strange ways.

Therapy was more like a long, arduous hike to a valley—a valley made just for you.

Trying to make new friends from scratch when you’re well into adulthood is an emotionally debilitating experience.

I preferred having a few best friends rather than a large group, because this meant that the friends I did have, I fundamentally understood and appreciated on a meaningful level.

Pretending to be extroverted when you’re introverted is about as fun as shoving your face into a dirty bucket of ice.

A funny thing happens when someone asks, “How are you?” coupled with a meaningful head tilt. The reflexive, safe answer to give is “Good, thanks.” But then again, we say “good” only because “good” makes the question go away. Tell someone “I’m doing horribly” and the conversation gets knocked off its axis into a marsh of soggy discomfort.

My friends didn’t come in the fast and effortless way I had hoped for. They arrived slowly, but exquisitely, blazing through the night sky like shooting stars at 1:48 a.m., long after I had stopped looking for them. I guess my mum was right after all. All I had to do was wait.

I even learned how to negotiate my salary—a nuanced art and necessary evil.

I imagine impostor syndrome appears in different forms depending on its host—my manifestation was this unyielding fear that I was nowhere near as competent as others believed me to be.

A small, soothing rush of unexpected knowledge, just enough to make me second-guess my own self-doubt, came flooding through at the most critical hour.

And whenever I feel that creeping sensation of inadequacy and self-doubt driving me too close to the edge, I stop, and I whisper to myself, “It’s okay to not know things. Not knowing things is the first step to knowing things.” It is, of course, completely unnecessary to whisper, but that just makes it all the more necessary.

while I made the effort to be dependable and responsible when necessary, I always made sure to leave a small margin for joy—a slight, yet critical barrier to separate myself from the real adults of the world.

Tasteful furniture purchases became personal treats, and decorating my home with trees and plants brought me an unsettling level of joy.

Age Limbo—this period of not old and not young—I

for the most part, we eat healthier, sleep earlier, and take better care of ourselves because—simply put—it’s nice to not have to feel like shit.

The problem with getting older is that you start asking yourself increasingly annoying questions—questions like: What am I doing with my life? What am I supposed to be doing with my life? Where is this all even going?

A true friend is someone who is willing and able to scold you when you’re being a total frickin’ idiot.

In the months that followed, the glitz of Google gradually faded, and work slowly became just work. Eventually, there were normal work struggles—just like any other place. And as much as I was grateful for all the new wonders in my life, I somehow managed to find myself feeling lost yet again.

I think a part of me had always wondered if there was a bit of regret, but I just never allowed myself to fully explore the feeling because I was scared of what I might find. I didn’t think I was allowed to feel anything but happiness over something that’s supposed to make me feel happy. It almost seemed ungrateful to let myself feel what I actually felt—ungrateful to whom, I couldn’t say.

I think we’re allowed to just . . . do whatever it is that we want to do. Whatever it is that makes us happy.

Maybe feeling lost is just the prerequisite of adventure—the first chapter of any good story.