I feel old. George Carlin, who was also once old and is now dead as a side effect of becoming too old, said that he'd bullshit himself by saying he was "getting older" as opposed to simply "old". He ultimately surrendered to the concept, and inevitably so did his consciousness. I don't feel like I'm getting older, though. I just feel like I'm getting old.
It's not just the feeling, either: I'm looking old, too. Well, older, I should say; I'll bullshit myself a bit here. There are lines in my face, several hairs in my beard and along my temples are changing hue in preparation for gray, and the stress of my parents dying eight months apart has caused my hair to fall out in clumps in the shower, like the flesh of the guy in Poltergeist or something. If you ever need a sobering experience, look down at your palms to find all of your hair in them. Truly horrifying. What Alfred Hitchcock did for birds, stress is doing to my daily shampooing.
I'm sure some of you can relate who are, say, 22 years old or so and know that while you technically qualify as an adult, you're not really an adult. This varies from person to person depending on their situation, but as a middle class white American kid, I had it pretty easy. Sure, I could vote and legally drink, and I even paid some bills, but responsibilities? Making a fucking phone call to resolve a basic issue or renegotiate my cell phone bill lower made me anxious beyond belief. Eight years later and I'm cremating my mother and worrying about being a sudden home owner of a house I want nothing to do with while planning a wedding. Jesus.
I spent my late teens and early twenties trying desperately to please influential people who I considered to be adults. I wanted to become a writer. I wanted to be taken seriously. I wanted to be like them. I'd stay up 72 hours straight working to impress the higher-ups and make a name for myself to appear as though I was an adult. I even bought into it a bit, myself. This may offend some of you youngins, but just like most under the age of 25, I was a manchild living a life of illusion. The hard work received a few nods from company presidents, COOs, and Editor-In-Chiefs, but I was so low on the totem pole that regardless of the quality or quantity of my work, the false perception I had built for myself--that I was a functioning, hard-working adult--was seen through the X-ray specs of these powerful men and women. I worked harder than I should have to prove I was worthy of it and I ultimately worked for nothing, as it was approved of with a glance as opposed to a good, hard look. All of the work I put in was forgotten in time.
I'm 30 now. I finally gave up on wanting to be perceived in certain ways, because truly becoming an adult is an accumulation of knowledge that you can only gather in time. It's coming naturally and is not something that can be fabricated. It used to infuriate me when true adults would explain that they knew more because they were older. I am an intelligent guy and the things I believed at 20 are still the things I believe today. While I may have had the fundamentals right and they did not, I can assuredly say that they were right in some ways. The older you get, the more knowledge you will compile on a broad spectrum of subjects. In five years, I will have more knowledge than I have now. In ten years, I will be vastly wiser than I had now, especially once these growing pains subside, with a lot less hair and a lot more wrinkles--but I'll be distinguished, goddammit.
My advice? Be well spoken for yourself, not others. Impress yourself with it. Cordially acknowledge that you will learn more as you get older to your peers, but call them out on their bullshit all the same. Life isn't a TV dinner where you stop progressing when the timer dings. Put some effort into learning new things instead of sitting back and waiting for something to happen. Don't set out to prove things to other people, only yourself.
If you're like how I was, you'll inevitably stop caring about being perceived as an adult when you realize there are bigger problems in your life. Guess what? This ironically signifies that you're a real adult. Congratulations. You made it. Now enough of that shit, adults don't have time for lollygagging.