Aoife Henry

The original version of this article was posted in November, 2022.

Chapter V.
I walk down a different street.

Autobiography in Five Short Chapters, Portia Nelson

Friends, we are turning into adults. This didn’t happen when we turned 16, of 18 or 21, or when we wore gowns and received certificate in Latin on graduation day. Nor did it happen the day we moved out, or (hypothetically) the day we get married, bear a child, buy property, write a book, start a business, get promoted, work for Google.

Adulthood, as I define it here, is discovering your inner cynic. It happens in degrees, and involves letting go of the space-cowboy dreams of Childhood and facing realities that are, at first, intensely uncomfortable. I inched towards adulthood as it dawned on me that I would not found a successful company before 25 and that I would not compete as a professional athlete on par with the most elite. 

This is not to say that adulthood is a bad thing, it just involves a grieving period for the child who believed that they could fly to the moon if they just wanted in badly enough. 

Adulthood is the understanding that you can try to do anything but not everything, and that you will fail at many of those things, but that there is value in the trying. 

Adulthood is acknowledging the time that you have spent hurting yourself and perhaps others, accepting that you cannot change this, and making moves to spend less time hurting yourself and others in the future. The unhelpful coping mechanisms, the numbing, the procrastination, the over-working, the binge-consumption of toxins in all of their alluring forms, the beating yourself up, the perfectionism. It is done and cannot be undone. Adulthood is recognizing your vulnerability, your vincibility, that you cannot continue to absorb this self-harm. It is shucking your armour of pride and roadmap of false promises in favour of taking hold of the hands that can help you to climb out of the hell you have called home.

Adulthood is seeing the beautiful, necessary value in unproductivity, in nothingness, in days spent aimlessly looking at the clouds with a friend or a partner, watching movies in company, laughing at the same old jokes, dancing to a song you’ve heard 100 times, playing a 4-chord classic because it makes you feel good. It is learning to ride the razor’s edge of “doing” productive and creative things and simply “being” with your thoughts and your feelings without trying to do, fix, or change anything at all.

Adulthood is realizing that we will never get “there”, that the notion of a higher place, a perfect body, a saturation of contentment with yourself and your place in life is a fiction. It is acknowledging that happiness is a lifelong work-in-progress, that uncomfortable thoughts and feelings will always come up, and that one of the most important skills you can practise is to befriend those feelings instead of smothering them. Adulthood is knowing that no matter what you “get done” today, that you are brave, you are trying and you are already enough. To love and be loved by yourself is enough (if you are reading this, chances are that I know you well and I love you with all of my heart). To laugh is enough (we’ve had plenty of that). To give it a lash is enough (no f*cker could take that away from us). Adulthood is gazing over the memory-catcher photos in your room and thinking that if something tragic were to happen to you, you’ve had a great fucking run of highs and lows and the full range of colourful moments.

Adulthood is distinguishing between better and perfect, is celebrating the small wins and shaking off the setbacks rather than bullying yourself.

A lot of my goals could be roughly divided into goals for personal change (mastery, personal achievements) and for global change (making the world a better place). My approach to both is changing with the onset of Adulthood.

personal change as an adult

what doesn’t work

• the powerful but ultimately fleeting feelings of resolve and determination
• beating yourself up for not following through
• fresh-starts, quit timers, habit trackers
• restrictive, ‘all or nothing’ rules

what does work

• paying curious and compassionate attention to, and feeling the unadulterated, raw pain or joy of your actions, rather than numbing, and either wanting or not wanting to feel that again
• self-compassion: being kind to yourself when you are anything less than perfect
• perseverance and resilience, getting back up and dusting yourself off and trying again

global change as an adult

what doesn’t work

• personal lifestyle change in the face of overwhelming corporate and political power
• getting angry with and judgmental of people who don’t share your opinion or practises on how to influence global change
• wanting to conquer the world and feeling dissatisfied with anything less

what does work

• finding contentment in making a very small positive impact on at least one person’s life, even if that person is you and that positive impact is making yourself laugh
• pursuing a career (or a side-career if you can’t get paid for it) because you really enjoy it, not because you think its what you should be doing – if it contributes to the greater good, wonderful, if it doesn’t but you get paid well, consider giving a proportion of it away