It’s a Tuesday. Today I learned that Tuesdays are the days of Mars, and it was named Tiwesdæg after Tiw, the Anglo-Saxon god of war. True to its name, it did, indeed, feel like I was in battle all day long. There can be nothing more enervating than doing all of this—adulting, as we fondly call something so utterly enraging—all the time. I don’t think we’re allowed to say this, though! Moreover, who would? It’s an affront to all that we’ve possibly dreamed of our whole teenage lives. Would be embarrassing to admit; after all, we were all just dying to grow up. Dying we are indeed— and fast. I don’t suppose we say any of this enough. We complain too much that we complain too much that we- but really, I think we’re allowed to, on some days, cultivate a rage room of sorts to simply mourn the loss of our childhood and all the perks (i.e., lack of responsibilities) that came with it. I’m saying it now: it absolutely sucks to grow up and I AM SO TIRED.
Welcome to my rage room.
For starters, you have to figure out whether the four (in my case, five) years you’ve spent (money and time) at university is actually the same thing you want to be doing for the rest of your life. You then land a job and are grateful for said job simply to say that you’re employed, and simply to know that you’re employable. Once the validation and the sheen wears off, you clock into work for a minimum of eight hours and spend at least six questioning why you’re there in the first place. You change jobs if you’re lucky, but end up sacrificing either money, sleep, or a social life after having done that. If you stick around, you have heaps of money. That’s it—if you thought there’s going to be another upside to that, you might as well stop reading here.
You (have to) start worrying about your health; you ignore the bigger problems and they go away, but you ignore the little niggles and you’re stuck on medication that will last a while. You decide to tackle this conundrum by worrying about every little thing all the time. If you’re doing fine, worry about your parents’. You then worry about money problems and whether you need to invest. You realise that this does not refer to buying that tunic from that one unique conscious clothing brand that you really convinced yourself was different.
When you’re finally starting to figure out how to handle being a working professional, life will throw a spanner in the works, and you can start fretting about whether the electricity bill, the gas bill, the wi-fi bill, the water bill, or the Bill of Rights has been adequately paid, and if not, then you better start paying it all mindlessly lest you should be deemed a defaulter. By whom? I don’t know, just pay! Little do they realise that you are, by default, anxious, and so anything that appears remotely in red and bold letters will be enough to scare the shit out of you and compel you to action. After these, you can then go on to seeing whether all that you’ve been paying for actually works. Fun fact— the two are mutually exclusive, and you’ll only learn this the hard way. xoxo You see, the water that comes into your house is work handled by a plumber, but the wiring that it requires to ensure that it moves smoothly throughout the house? Nope, that’s for an electrician. Didn’t you learn this? Abso-fucking-lutely not. Did I need to? I guess so— if I thought I had learned enough about jurisdiction, I was so wrong.
People say that you throw money at a problem and it goes away. This doesn’t work when people are the problem. The people in our immediate lives are like a tin of assorted Quality Street chocolates—you have your favourites, you know what you detest, but you’re left with no choice sometimes. You can choose your inner circle girlfriends to go out to Strangr with for the night, but you can’t choose the landlady who is upset that you didn’t foot her next kitty party bill through an unnecessary repair. You learn that you can’t engage with family on politics without the night ending in tears. There are the girls who flirt with boyfriends and pretend like you’re the problem. There are the men who flirt with you and then say they have girlfriends. There are the men who are Nice™️ and say yes to everyone, so, in effect, say no to having a spine. There are the Men (with a capital M) who bench press the equivalent weight of their egos, grunt with each thrust, and cry that they’re different from the rest while you, the woman, are really the problem. You meet your heroes and they turn out to be horrible people. You meet the odd racist or casteist, who will show kindness in other ways, and you’re left gauging whether they’re good or bad people. You realise that good or bad, in principle, potentially doesn’t exist. There are the bad bosses who astound you with their quirks and make you cry, and the good ones who bewilder you with their generosity, and make you cry even harder. There are people who will misconstrue your words for the worse, or worse— those who will misconstrue them for the better.
I’ve heard time and again that this is all part of character development. I wonder whether this is all fodder for the personality disorder that I will soon develop. Be the bigger person. So that I can step on them? Haha. Kidding. It’s a huge gamble taking that step, because it becomes a slippery slope; from being accepting, you’re soon the doormat. As if all of this isn’t difficult enough, I think I’ll spare you all the experiences of dating as an adult. As kids, it was easier having a crush and ruminating over it in the quiet corners of our minds, or playing FLAMES in our little notebooks and rigging the system by picking out what works. As adults, you drink a vodka and orange juice in a friend’s apartment on a Tuesday evening, mulling over it all, while editing your newsletter and holding it together.
(You’ll cry once you go back home).
Spare me the wisdom of being grateful, or reminding me about the travails of being a teenager. Trust me, I know. I also know that things only get worse from here. While these may very well be the best days of our lives, there’s got to be some raw, unfiltered acknowledgement of how there are also some pretty terrible moments in our days. We can, of course, laugh about them in hindsight. After all the most painful part of being an adult (second only to not having summer vacation) is keeping calm and carrying on.