The Bittersweetness of Adulthood

Lately, I’ve had difficulty sitting down and writing a cohesive thought. It might be because I’ve spread myself across multiple channels of reflection: I’m doing The Artist’s Way journey by Julia Cameron, which requires writing Morning Pages daily, and I also have my own journal where I express my raw thoughts. Maybe I’m just not the biggest fan of repeating myself, but instead of creating clarity, it’s dispersing my sense of continuity. All that to say, I’ve been experiencing a certain lack of stability lately that makes it hard for me to form a finished thought and write it down.

As a kid, the turmoils of a mid-twenties adult seemed poetic, and I was bluntly jealous of them. The complicated love, the messy apartments, the strong sense of identity portrayed through characters in 90s movies — all of it looked cinematic and alive. Those stories sugarcoated reality for me. But now that I’m inside that stage of life, I see the emotional cost of it. Settling into adult life is simply bittersweet, but just because the sourness is the last thing we remember, it shouldn’t erase the sweetness of it all. It can be sweet, it can be sour, but all in all, it is uncomfortable — a shedding of a younger self. To embrace a new version of ourselves and grow into new kinds of sweetness, we have to let go of the sweetness of our past selves. It’s grieving, and grieving is always hard.

This experience is inherently unfinished for me, so maybe that’s why I can’t formulate a finished thought about it.

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