Overwhelmed by Being an Adult


I have grown up. I am now a 20 and a half-year-old woman living in a rented house for most of the year while I study for a degree away from home.


I don't know when it happened, but it definitely feels like it all happened without me even being there. I feel like my life has been on fast forward and now I'm here and I don't know how to function or think. Am I not meant to feel different and feel like an adult when I'm all grown up?

I always knew I'd end up leaving home and going to university to do a degree but I don't think I ever really gave any thought to how that would look and I definitely never looked further than that three-year degree. I was kind of destiny for me to get a degree so I wasn't really pushed into thinking much further about it. Everyone just assumed that's how my life would pan out.

Now I'm actually here, about to go into the second year of my degree, it's all really overwhelming.

I have the role of an adult, yet I don't feel like an adult at all. I'm doing adult things like cleaning the house, going grocery shopping, and being in charge of my days, but I still don't feel like an adult. I am the age of an adult and have the responsibility of an adult, and I feel like a child.

This is really hard to talk about. So many people in their early twenties either seem to have everything figured out or have absolutely no idea what's going on and when they became an adult. I have a few friends who fit both those categories. This fact never seems to help me feel like I'm not the only one though because I feel confident that my friends who are unsure will get there eventually. However, I can't seem to believe I will ever get there.

At home, I don't really think about how grown up I am or how grown up I should be and mostly it's all the good things about being grown up that happen at home. It probably has a lot to do with the familiarity of being with my family which hasn't changed my whole life, so I do adult things but less so and there is the reassurance of loved ones being just there and having my back.

A couple of days ago, I moved in my second year house for the new term at university and these thoughts just started really overwhelming me. In my first year at university, I lived in a flat on campus with twenty other people and it felt like a sleepover almost every single day. But now I'm in a rented house with only three other people, it definitely feels so much more grown-up and that's just overwhelming.

I have also been overthinking about my future recently, which hasn't helped with the general overwhelmed feeling. My peers and I have a massive pressure put on us to know what we want to be doing with our future and exactly how we're going to get there. It is so unnecessary to put this stress on us and really doesn't help with our worries about the future.

I have no idea what I want to do with my life. I have seemingly simple goals like wanting to be happy, content and fulfilled with the life I am living. These kind of goals aren't the ones that the people around us want us to have though.

They want us to have a well thought out and "realistic" plan, but honestly, what's realistic about that. I am so indecisive that I would probably change my mind about that plan anyway and so isn't it better to focus on how you want to feel. I am definitely no expert, but I just know that the pressure to know what I want to do, for me, is unhelpful.

So really, there are a lot of things which have overwhelmed me about growing up into a fully-fledged adult and I know they're not going to go away anytime soon. I probably need to do some real work on myself to have a better idea about what my future will look like and I probably need to work on just embracing where I am with my life.

Here's to being a young adult in this big ol' world.

Photo by Adam NieÅ›cioruk on Unsplash

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