Calling all soon-to-be college grads who are quickly approaching adulthood but honestly have no idea what they’re doing…
After graduation, college students are expected to go off into the world and become active members of society. Upon their entrance into the “real world,” twenty-somethings suddenly find themselves living away from home, doing their own taxes and laundry, preparing their own meals and handling life’s daily crises by themselves. Mom or dad may be a phone call away, but adulthood in America means doing everything you can to come out from under their comfortable wing.
Concerning the now-college students who are expected to properly adult one day, AKA all of us, you’d think the institutions of higher learning we attend would put more effort into teaching us how to succeed in adulthood. While many of us are required to take liberal arts courses to become “well-rounded students,” colleges usually fail to educate us on the basic skills necessary to everyday life. We may be able to name all 43 presidents of the United States or solve equations using y=mx+b in our sleep, but how many of us can successfully fix that hole in our favorite pair of jeans?
Where’s the class that teaches us that putting tin foil in the microwave causes a minor explosion? Or the professor who warns against using hand soap in a dishwater, unless you’re trying to have a foam party in your kitchen? Who’s going to teach us how to effectively hail a cab? Where are we supposed to go to learn how to sew a button, do our taxes, build credit? What even is credit?
Brooklyn author and artist Sarah Andersen illustrates this utter lack of preparation for adulthood in her comic, “Adulthood is a Myth.” Through a collection of “scribbles,” Andersen humorously presents a variety of situations and feelings that any young adult can relate to.
The truth is, you’re not the only one who pretends to be in a crowded room of people when you really don’t want to talk to someone. Plenty of us make the senseless decision to stay up all night to watch Netflix, or read a book for absolutely no reason at all. And if you don’t smother yourself with your clothes right after they come out of the dryer, I seriously don’t believe you.
A year from now, we’re supposed to be productive individuals with a credit card, bills to pay and career aspirations to work toward. Yet we’re still those people who wait weeks to wash their jeans, blow through paychecks in two days, or spend all day dreaming about the next time we can be in pajamas. We clean our rooms by stuffing everything under the bed or in the closet. We eat healthy all day just to binge on take-out Chinese or delivery pizza come midnight. Young ladies forget to shave their legs, spend ten minutes digging through their black hole of a purse, and wear painful heels for the sole reason of how good they make their legs look.
If you ever feel overwhelmed or widely unprepared for what is to come after college, remember that you’re not alone. Every college grad is as lost as the next one, some are just better at hiding it. As my 51-year-old mother always tells me, “I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up.”
Shout out to Her Campus National for gifting the Marist chapter with this insanely relatable book.