I'm not complaining about having to deal with any of this*, but I just have to ask: Jesus-H-Christ-on-a-Bicycle, when and where was I supposed to learn how to be An Adult, and how did I miss those lessons!? I discovered EPU through NXE around 1997 or '98 as a lazy, awkward, unhappy teen, and I feel like I'm still that person, even though I look like my dad in the mirror. I even grew a goatee, but that was entirely due to my kids grabbing handfuls of my face during bottle feeding, and it hurts less for them to squeeze hair rather than skin. On the deceased parental/grandparental side of things, it turned out I was specified as Grandma's Power of Attorney/Trustee for all her investments and stuff . . . which I only learned about after Mom died, having left me no instructions at all on what to do and how to do it.

I guess what I'm trying to get a handle on, does imposter syndrome or whatever you want to call it usually last this long? My apologies for just unloading here (and feel free to delete this post if it's out of bounds), but I really do feel more positive about the impressions of you internet not-quite-strangers than my real-life friends (who mostly feel like they're in the same boat), my wife (ditto), or my Dad (who's just a hermit and generally wouldn't tell me how he's feeling if he was on fire).

Thanks for reading.

*Okay, I could complain about my kids, who generally act like lunatics, but eh . . .
"This is probably a stupid question, but . . ."

It's resulted in two or three generations of people not knowing what the hell they're doing under the thumb of the oldest generation who DOES know what they're doing.

It's going to end with the generation who knows what they're doing dying off and leaving everyone up the creek.

For that matter I don't think I still know how to Adult properly. We're all just stumbling around blind, falling flat on our faces, walking into doors, and in general fucking up. The Adulting part is that we're now responsible for cleaning up after ourselves instead of someone else (ie, parents) having to do it for us.

My son (24) is ostensibly an adult and at this point I can either castigate myself because, even though I tried countless times to tell him How To Do That or Not To Do That and even showed him Why You Don't Do That, he still Does That and winds up having problems.

Or... I can accept that Adulting is just something that you have to learn by doing. Which may be true. The alternative is that I fucked up, and so did my parents, and in hindsight, so did their parents, so on ad infinitum. I have no way to know which is objectively true, so I try to choose the option that leaves me feeling less like a dickhead.

--sofaspud
--

OK, so, story time. Sometime in the summer of 2001, when I still lived in Massachusetts, my grandfather came down for a visit. While he was there, we went to the museum at the Springfield Armory National Historic Site.

On the drive over, we were talking about how he and my grandmother had recently decided to leave their home in the tiny woods community of Oxbow, which they loved, and move closer to the nearest town big enough to have a hospital. Gram had some increasing health challenges, and moving closer to town seemed like the grown-up thing to do, even though neither of them really wanted to.

At the time we had that conversation, I was 28 and had recently been laid off from what turned out to be the last of a string of mostly pointless tech jobs I'd been chasing for the past eight years and had no earthly idea what the hell I was going to do next. I said pretty much exactly the above, particularly the "when am I supposed to start feeling like I'm on top of this shit" question.

Gramp thought about it for a second and then said, "Well... I'll let you know."

This was a 71-year-old man who had, in the course of his life to that date:

- Extensively renovated or just outright built every home he lived in since moving out on his own. (He went onto build another house, admittedly with a lot of help from my father and some of his friends, after we had that conversation.)
- Made all his own furniture, and most of my father's, and a fair percentage of mine.
- Got married once, at 20, and was still married to the same woman when she died 65 years later.
- Fathered four children, all of whom survived into adulthood (which was still a fairly neat trick if you were born in rural America in the 1950s).
- Competed at a very high level in military-style rifle shooting, including being a member of the U.S. Army Reserve team that won its class at the Camp Perry National Matches one year.
- Resigned his commission as an officer in said Army Reserve, only a year or so shy of vesting his full pension, in principled protest over the war in Vietnam.
- Taught high school English for 20-odd years.
- Worked for the Maine Forest Service for many years after his teaching career, because he found retirement unendurably boring.
- Generally possessed the kind of skill set and psyche that would have made him one of those guys who survive a plane crash in the remote wilderness and hike out of the woods six months after being given up for dead, wondering why everyone's so surprised.

And he was telling me he had no idea when a man ceases to feel like three kids in a trench coat and starts to feel like an Actual Grown-Up, because it hadn't happened to him yet either.

At that point I decided there was no point worrying about it and, in fact, everyone is just making it up as they go along.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.