In 2 days I will officially be an adult whether I like it or not. At the ripe age of 26, I'll be thrown off of the ACA, which I've been benefiting from through my parents, and then placed neatly, or so I hope, into the healthcare provided by my employer.
The confines of legal adulthood have, thus far, shown a myriad of simplicities and complexities; though, I'd argue that, when thrown into a baking bowl, I'd most often find 2 parts of the former and about 10 parts of the latter, but I digress...
Speaking from a personal point of view, adulthood feels like the months or weeks leading up to a war-time battle overseas. At one moment, I'm perfectly fine: laughing with friends, running errands, doing laundry, etc. And the next, like an avalanche of thought that hits me all at once, the fact that I'm about to be in a life-or-death battle swarms around all of my other little, insignificant musings and smothers them as if they were never in existence. Am I a part of a big enough troop? Will there be enough rations for my own sustenance? Will I have enough ammunition to secure myself? Will there be enough cover on the battlefield for me to dodge the deadliness of seemingly relentless offensive strikes that will, most assuredly, demoralize and petrify? Am I going to die? Am I going to die? Am I going to die?
This analogy is my anxiety.
In a constantly changing world, a great support system, of which I have, is hardly enough to douse my burning mind, but that doesn't mean it's not helping. I'm not quite sure where I would be without my friends and family.
As an adolescent, success was aspired. Each bump or jump along the way, an F on a math quiz to an A+ in an honors Spanish test, was, for me, an easily-marked dot on the upward slope of my life graph. But now that I'm an adult, success is refracted sunlight hitting an otherwise dark cave. So long as I'm a dust particle floating in the line of the sunlight, I'm fine. In other words, so long as the success I have is continued, I'll be fine, but now that I'm practically "There," I realize so much could go wrong. One wrong move, and I'm out of the warmth of the light. Especially the things I can't even remotely control. Most of the time I'm able to let go of the things I can't control, but when those things are life events: work, growing older, ailing family, moving-because-I'm-a-grown-up-now-duh, my psyche goes haywire. It's frustrating, exhausting, and even nauseating. The things/events that I'm excited about and looking forward to are the same things/events that I'm afraid could get up and walk away/never happen.
Perhaps that's what this part of life is for: Becoming an adept war-veteran in life. That path has to start somewhere...
Right?
- PatInTheHat
