THE HARSH TRUTHS OF ADULT LIFE.

       What is it that nobody tells you about adult life?

That adult life is much, much better than childhood.

If you find yourself thinking the opposite, you are romanticising “not having any responsibility” while ignoring the other side of it, which does not have any freedom!

As a child, your happiness was totally dependent on the adults around you. Whereas as an adult, you are responsible for your own happiness, and it’s simply great!

While it’s true that things are simpler in childhood, that’s also because your perception of things is simpler, primarily because you are a child and aren’t capable of grasping life in all its nuances. As an adult, this changes. You realise the context of most things sometimes to your own peril. You also risk complicating things.

But that’s the best part of being an adult. That it’s all on you. If you complicate things, you are free to sort them out instead of depending on someone else.

Life only gets better steadily! With experience.

Relationships get better with experience. Communication gets better with experience. Sex gets better with experience. You understand that love is a practice and a verb. It is also hard work.

With age, your edges smoothen, and you learn the value of kindness and compassion above intelligence and logic. You realise that more things are likely to work out with love than with arguments, however brilliant! This makes you a better person.

Your manner of dealing with conflict gets better with age. Your manner of handling disappointments, hardships, and sorrows gets better with age.

You realise how temporary most of your feelings are, with age. With a little more age, you realise the same is true of your thoughts. With age, you learn to therefore take yourself much less seriously.

With age, you also learn one of the biggest lessons your younger self usually misses – there is no ultimate meaning to life. Your life will be what you make of it. It is on you to give it meaning.

As an adult, you don’t need anybody’s permission, and you can live your life on your own terms. You have complete freedom along with the intelligence and maturity to understand that freedom comes with responsibility – something I am sure your teenage self would love to realise.

Adult life is great. I’d rather be an adult than a child. Any day.