Barely Functional Adult: It’ll All Make Sense Eventually

by Meichi Ng

There’s comfort in knowing you can be on your way to somewhere good even if you’re not always in control of it all.

There is something to be said about the people who are able to give us the exact kind of junk we love. Not the expensive gifts, because anyone can give those, but the inexpensive ones, the crap no one would steal if we left it out in our cars, the worthless but priceless totems that remind us we are seen.

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.

The whole adage of “do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life” is fallacious baloney. First of all, it requires you to actually know what you love. And if you don’t, congratulations! Now you get to feel this wonderful extra layer of pressure to figure it all out. Secondly, work will always be work, regardless of how much you love doing it.

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.

But I 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’ve been hard on myself lately,” I began. “I feel like I always have a long list of things I need to do, but I keep getting distracted doing useless things like watching TV or mindlessly scrolling through the internet. And at the end of each wasted day, I always ask myself, ‘What is wrong with you? Why are you like this?’ It’s like . . . this crippling cycle of guilt and disappointment, and it always ends in anger towards myself for not being better.”

“Sometimes I feel like . . . nothing I do is ever good enough or will ever be good enough,” I said, opening yet another jar.

Therapy didn’t fix me. If anything, therapy revealed all my broken pieces at a higher fidelity. But maybe that’s the point. Embracing how everyone is broken in their own ways and learning how to feel okay about it. 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.

I started to wonder if I was really competent or merely competent at pretending to be competent.

Positive feedback started making me anxious, and critical feedback gave me a perverse sense of relief. Whenever I received a compliment, I would assume it was misplaced.

Maybe feeling lost is what pushes us to keep exploring.