On Adulthood

I don't necessarily think being an adult comes from "having responsibilities" or "having your shit together" or having "stopped doing childish things." (Because I haven't really achieved any of those.) I feel that I began to become an adult when I began to have an "inner life," and I credit reaching a certain level of literacy for that. Having the faculties to read adult society's newspapers and magazines, to watch the news, to read "real" books that weren't for kids. To understand them, to form my own opinions, to leave the mental garden of childhood.

The internet was a revolution. We were the first generation to use it to help us grow up. I felt like I was becoming a citizen, with all the meanings that word entails. I could begin developing my own philosophy and outlook, as opposed to having parents or teachers tell me what they should be. I think that was a big part of being an adult. Posting on the Mobius Forum.  It was the first time I was able to have people talk TO me as opposed to talking AT me the way adults do with a child. MoFo was anonymous, where no one had to know my age, education, race, sex, class. It was a place to simply develop a life of the mind at a time when otherwise a kid isn't considered a real person, but sort of an extension of their parents.

Obviously life is a continuous progression, nobody blooms overnight. But I do think, among many many other things, that that was the start of it.

Also, I think of adulthood not necessarily as maturity, but as agency and freedom.

• College was where I finally met warm, kind and funny people who were real peers in both an intellectual and emotional sense. (You have no idea how happy I was to be out of high school and all its shallow retardedness, lawl.) 
• Going from riding a bike, to figuring out the bus and subway routes, to learning to drive and literally expanding the physical boundaries of my world. 
• Entering an adult relationship where the love was deep and reciprocated and getting engaged so we're socially acknowledged as a household. 
• Getting my own apartment where I felt it was really, finally, a home to call my own. I could decide what there was to eat, what the furniture was, who got to come over, what events I could plan. I was the first of my friends with my own apartment, so my social circle started to revolve around My Place. It's pretty awesome. 

All the transition points where I felt I became more adult have to do with agency. If anything, responsibility and boring-ness makes me feel more like a child. Adulthood isn't about going to work and paying bills, where you have to do arbitrary menial things because someone told you to, where you have to wear uncomfortable clothes and be on your best behavior, where people dictate your schedule and where you're embarrassed of the things that make you truly who you are.