📝 When can you consider yourself a grown-up adult?
When can you consider yourself a grown-up adult?
Not when society perceives you as one. The question is about you and your own perception.
I’ve seen people start calling themselves adults when:
- they began living on their own
- they graduated from school or university
- they earned their first decent salary
- they bought a car, a house, or even a helicopter
- they started their own families
The list goes on.
But here’s my proposition. Hear me out and sit with the idea for a moment:
You truly become an adult when you forgive your parents.
No matter how good or bad, how easy or difficult your upbringing was, we don’t choose where to be born or who to be born to.
At some point in your life, when you start facing difficult choices that shape your path, you’ll pause for a bit. You might even think about your parents, and the choices they once faced. That, my friend, is when you hit something truly profound.
In hindsight, it’s easy to judge. But in the moment, given all the knowns and unknowns, seemingly easy choices are hard. Hard to make, harder to predict. Hardest of all to follow them through.
At the time, your parents did the best they could, with what little resources they had, under the circumstances they were in. And most likely, those circumstances weren’t easy. They rarely are. To an adult, that needs no explaining.
Life is the sum of choices we make throughout it. Excellent or poor, it matters not. Your choices are yours alone.
After facing a few tough forks in the road yourself, you might begin to understand your parents better as to where they came from, so to speak.
Their choices were their own. And you will have your fair share of choices to make.
Remember, you will be judged for your life choices by your kids for the longest time.
Until they grow up enough to forgive you.
