Seven months ago, I turned eighteen and from then on I was told I’m an adult. At school, the teachers guilted us for not taking responsibility to clean our kitchen or take school events seriously because “we’re adults,” but in reality how were we any different to being seventeen? Being an adult is simply a concept I am struggling to understand because there is no definition of it.
Youth suffer under immense pressure to act “adult-like” from a young age. My cousin, only seven years old, is praised for being mature and often criticised for acting childlike despite her age.
Does this form of praise affect us later on in life?
In my experience, yes. Going out to parties and drinking I was having fun and really feeling like a teenager by letting go of my insecurities and immersing myself into the atmosphere of a party, but the next day, hungover or sober, I scolded myself because my behaviour was irresponsible. This makes me question if there can even be a balance between responsibility and pleasure without the feeling of guilt when the traits of maturity have been emphasised in so many of us from a young age.
Adulthood is associated with maturity, therefore it is a concept linked with the connotation of seriousness and sobering, in a way, a concept without fun. Why aren’t we taught that there is a possibility of balance between adulthood and fun? Is it a way for the older generation to prepare us for the “real world”?
Seven months into being eighteen I feel barely any different from being seventeen and I believe that is because my responsibilities for myself have not changed. In 2017 I am looking to move to another state to start university; by the theory that the shift from childhood to adulthood relies on the change of responsibility then university should be that defining factor. Right now, in between the end of high school and the beginning of university, I feel like I am in a void where for the first time in my life there is simply nothing to do; no one is asking me to hand in something, there are no deadlines, there are no rules that dictate when I sleep and when I wake up.
There is no responsibility.
From the adult-like traits that I have been praised for from a young age, I have fostered a sense of guilt in me when I stray from that inbuilt praise and act like the teenager I am, with little forethought and in the moment. The truth is there is no definition of an adult, it is a concept that each one of us, individually make of it; like every other societal construct, there is no rule created by a definition. In this day and age, we must emphasise our individuality and stray from the group conformity that is “adulthood.”
