Adulting’s Bullshit.

So, my 21st birthday is almost a month away and as I sit and reflect on my twenty years of life, I am filled with a feeling. A feeling, one can only describe as “pissed”. Pissed at the bullshit adults have tricked and trapped me in. Adults have been tasked with the job of caring for and raising their young. Not a simple or easy job by far, but not impossible. I do not believe it was in their job description to build a world, a society based on bullshit, designed to destroy us, not empower us.

I’m a 2000s baby, probably the last generation of kids who knows what it’s like to grow up outside of the internet, to only have your toys and your imagination to entertain yourself. I’m from the age of Vine, Myspace, Facebook before our parents took over. The traumatized and depressed generation, who all now have anxiety and probably smoke. A generation of rebels, if you will, we embody the true “fuck it” spirit. Judging by what I know about life now, compared to what Iwas told, I would go back and tell that little girl sneaking on her mom’s computer to play Poptropica in the middle of the night, to run.

Adults have done nothing, but half-assly prepare us for this trap they call adulting. This trap where we go to school, graduate, go to college, graduate and then work ourselves to our death beds. The college portion is optional and can be exchanged for other traps like the military or skipping straight to the action, getting in that workforce early. Regardless, they want us to end up working underpaid jobs and struggling up until we drop dead, and if that doesn’t sound like a trap, I don’t know what does.

Maybe that’s just a young black woman in America’s opinion, but this is all bullshit. I look at the life adults have laid out for me and I am frustrated. This can’t be all there is to life. Why do you think so many of today’s youth are taking the entrepreneurial path to life? It’s because they know as well as I do, if they follow what this world has dealt them, they’ll never know anything, but struggle. Yeah, there are some people perfectly happy with working a boring 9-5, and maybe they make just enough money for them and they’re content with life. That is just where they're expertise lie. The disrespect comes from adults grooming everyone for this lifestyle regardless of where their true expertise lie.

Our school systems are prisons and our curriculum is mediocre at best. During our early childhood education, curriculum focused more on incorporating every type of learning to each lesson to ensure all students are able to grasp the material. After elementary, they drop the inclusivity and begin knudging us all down that same path. After elementary, they don’t care about the different learning types, only that you learn the information to pass their tests. If you’re athletically gifted then you have no worries if sports if your path of choice, but what if it’s not?

Now, they’re people like me, who don’t know their expertise, but damn sure know it’s not labor. I don’t know what I’m good at, what I want to be, life has kicked my ass and all the adults can say is “that’s life”. That’s not life, that’s overgrown children with hidden trauma and scars like the rest of us posing as adults and not wanting to admit that maybe that’s not life. Maybe society’s just cruel, maybe their expectations are unrealistic, maybe our way of life is not a way a life at all, but really a means for control and survival, maybe i’m not being dramatic, maybe y’all are just assholes.

All I hear is adults telling me what I should be doing and constantly asking me why I’m not. Repeatedly pestering me with questions, I never have the answer to. Am I going to college? None of my siblings did, but apparently I’m “expected” to break the mold (nobody told me). When am I going to get a better job? My job doesn’t pay nearly enough, but I’m not getting a second job because my mental health could never. When am I going to get a place of my own? When somebody gives me some “place of my own” money. They ask me questions like I’m magically going to have the answers to all my problems and when I don’t, I’m the disappointment. Bullshit.

Our reality is that there are no “adults”, just hurt children raising hurt children. No one’s actually learning or growing, just getting older. The cycle just repeats and repeats until someone’s brave enough to step out of their box, and change their direction. One day i’ll be 40, hopefully with a family of my own and I don’t want my kids to suffer at the hands of this world or from it’s affect on me. I don’t want to groom them for a life I don’t even want for myself.

I’ll be 21 soon, but I’m no closer to feeling like an adult than I was at 16. This pressure of adulting, being responsible, and putting childish things behind me is too much for anyone to have to carry, but I guarantee everyone has felt it. That feeling of wanting to succeed but not wanting to fail. Everyone keeps saying 30 is right around the corner like that’s supposed to light a fire under my ass, but they’re just scaring me.

I was always told that wisdom can from experience, but that’s bullshit too. True wisdom comes from taking a step back to observe, reflect, and learn. I’m stepping out of that box and I’m doing something different because, I’ll be damned if I knowingly participate in this trap y’all call “Life”.