My birthday is coming up again in a couple days. I look back at my post around this time last year before I turned 21, and I almost want to say I was completely wrong. I don’t think it had anything to do with age or the number 21, but it feels like this past year, a switch was flipped, and I am now a fully functioning tax paying adult. Financially I have almost entirely detached from my parents, but besides just that I feel like I am now alone in the world. There is no wall (my parents) between me and the rest of the world. It was slow, but at the same time it was fast. And it seems a bit scary now that I’m thinking about it, but as it was happening, it just felt like trying new things. Of course, there’s still much more to being an adult than paying your own bills and taxes, but it’s that feeling of being an adult that I’m talking about. I feel right now that I could do anything. If I had the money, which I don’t, I feel like I could book a vacation to China right now all by myself. That’s a task which would have scared the living crap out of me even just a year ago. There were too many uncertainties, too many things that could go wrong that I would not be able to handle, but now I feel like no matter what happens, I’ll be able to figure it out.

This didn’t just happen overnight. Over the past year, I’ve been thrown into the deep end, so to speak, for many of the tasks which I attributed to things only fully functioning independent adults could do. Maybe this might seem silly, but working in an office to me was the definition of being an adult. It constituted as a stable job that provided me with an income that was enough to sustain myself. Then slowly I started taking over bills. It started with my internet, which was something my parents refused to pay for anymore, and that’s just not something I can live without, so I decided to call Comcast. Almost an entire year later, I feel like the transferring of bills onto myself is almost complete with me now paying for my own wireless plan, which combined with the rest, is a couple hundo a month. That doesn’t seem like a lot compared to most ‘adults’ bills, but for me, if someone had told me just a year ago that I would be paying almost all my bills in a year, just the anxiety of thinking about that would have been too much.

There is one thing over the past year that’s changed dramatically. This is something I never would have expected to happen, but maybe that’s what being an adult means. I’ll explain that in a bit. Basically what happened was I lost almost every single one of my close friendships. Last year I think I was at the peak of my social life, and I really doubt I will ever get there again. I was a part of 5 different groups of friends all at once, and it felt like I was talking to someone almost every second of the day. I was constantly forced to turn down invitations from friends since I had plans with other friends. Thinking back to that, it’s almost laughable how much that’s changed. I lost it all. I don’t know if it was me growing distant, or everyone else. But it all went away, and now I’ve hit rock bottom. I have almost forgotten what it was like to have plans with people. I don’t talk to anyone anymore. I rarely hear my own voice these days. And I thought that was supposed to be sad, but I don’t feel sad about it. In my head, it almost seems fitting. I know that’s not what it means to be an adult, but for some reason in my head it’s fitting that as an adult I would be alone.

That’s the scariest part about being an adult, or at least that’s what scares me. Not the having to pay taxes or my own bills, but knowing that now it’s just me and this great big world filled with people who don’t know me and don’t care about me. As an adult, I have the knowledge and a fairly developed skill set that would allow me to deal with any problem I have, but it’s scary to think emotionally I will be doing it alone. I hope that is a temporary situation however. Even though I will probably never get back to the level of friends I once had, I hope I can at least get back to the point where the only person to hear my voice wasn’t just myself. Until then, I have an entire world to explore!