Adult

I was having a slow morning today and while cracking two eggs into a hot pan, just remembered a line someone said to me yesterday. ‘Welcome to reality Fatima, you are an adult now.’ Looks so accurate, right. And yet it is not. I have been thinking about this sentence for the last 24 hours and yet, it doesn’t feel right somehow.

Then I played the ‘Adult’ by Ian Mcconnell. It goes like, ‘Damn, I feel like an adult, and I'm pretty sure I really don't like it, never thought I ever would, now I'm dancing 'round a quarter life crisis’. Check out the lyrics- it is brilliant. But unlike this song, I wasn’t feeling like an adult. At all. Then I started to think about what I have been thinking for the last few weeks. I genuinely feel like a child, and I think I am a child but unfortunately (or maybe fortunately who knows) I don’t get to act like one which is upsetting sometimes. And it’s not like a ‘having a child soul inside’ sort of situation. It’s simply resisting the fact of being an adult. I don’t know when exactly I am going to feel like one. But I don’t think I can feel like an adult when I still refer to my job as 'adult stuff.'

I often try hard not to laugh at serious meetings. Because in my head, it plays in the background, ‘I’m no one, what the heck am I doing here’. Not that I actually believe that I am a nobody. But I still struggle to believe what I do actually has value in it and people benefit from it. I almost never run away from responsibility. But when someone gives me a task, I initially get scared, and I feel the need to convince myself that I can do it. Not that I don’t feel capable or anything. But my inner child, the child in me, does not want to believe sometimes.

I did some research on this topic. The perks of being an academic... This feeling has a place in psychology and I partially agree with some of the reasons. I also read some blogs and forums and found that actually many others are also feeling the same. It is pretty reassuring; I am not gonna lie. Nobody wants to feel like an alien. But it still doesn’t solve my problem.

I think doing a Ph.D. doesn’t help this situation at all. Because you are still being referred to as a student. And being a student is always safe. You can make many mistakes and the consequences are usually not that big. You would have responsibilities but not like ‘saving the world’. Not that I am saving the world right now, but the vibe is definitely different than being 'just a student'.   

When I started writing this post, it felt like I am going to tie it somewhere. But, to be honest, this was just a thought that had been floating in my mind for a while, and I thought I should dump it somewhere. What are the blogs for anyway?