When are you an adult?

Concluding a class capping our undergraduate curriculum, and which prepared us for the next six months of full-time internship experience, our professor posed the question, "When are you an adult?" Perhaps it's when you turn 18 and vote. Or you leave home. Or if you go to college. Or turn 21. Or your brain fully develops around age 23. Or you reach your 'physical prime' around age 25. Or graduate college. Or get your first 'real' job. Or when you pay for all of your own bills, insurance, computers, cars... Or when you buy a house. Or when you get married. Or have kids. Or you take care of your own parents. Or you have grandchildren. Or you retire.


Or maybe it is whenever you accept the responsibility for your actions and their consequences, both good and bad. When you regulate or respond adaptively to your emotions, your body, the environment, and all sorts of changes. When you set and accomplish your own goals. When you define and live by your own rules. When you know how to expand your strengths and overcome your limitations. When people can trust you, and you can trust yourself. When you develop your own social networks, and when you are comfortable in your own head. When you can love, and others can love you. When you make sense of your life and your world. When you live towards a higher purpose. When you are filled with awe, wonder, curiosity, passion. Perhaps it is whenever you choose to be whatever you think an adult should be.

Why should you be an adult? Adults choose their destiny. Adults play with bigger toys. Adults can love other adults. Adults must change the world. Adults are not so different from children, or from parents, or from friends, or storybook characters, childhood dreams, or persona ideals. Adulthood subsumes childhood. Adults are everything they want to be, if they are adult enough to make such a choice. I have felt very low, and purposeless, and unmotivated, and helpless. And alone. As an adult, it is up to me, alone, to help myself grow up. To generate the motivation for creating purpose in my life. To soar high above the shortcomings of spoon-fed living. An adult embraces their burden of freedom. An adult goes about life building the playground of heaven.