Feeling older than you are? Welcome to real adulthood!

I remember feeling how terrible it was to be a child and how desperately I wanted to grow up. I was a fool. Being in my late 20s, lately I have been getting this strange feeling that 'I have become an adult after all', and it is an odd feeling, one that I do not like as much as I thought I would. Here are my struggles of being a grownup, and let it serve as a guiding manual to all the younger people in their early 20s.

Busy, busy, busy

The first noticeable indication of being an adult is that suddenly you have so much on your plate and so little time. Twenty-four feels like only four hours, and by the end of the day, when you get the satisfaction of your back touching the bed, you get overwhelmed by an ominous feeling because as soon as you wake up, you are going to have to do it all over again.

However, even with all the apprehensions in the world, you will fall asleep because the human body can only endure so much. And you will be glad for it because it feels amazing to lie on the bed with all the back pain that no one asked for (if you are smirking at me saying that you do not have back pain, just wait till you turn twenty-five).

Things change

Things will change. More than most of us can handle. All those amazing people you thought were heroic in your younger years, will not remain your heroes anymore as you grow older and start to learn more about them. It will hurt, but you are going to have to learn to live with it.

Your parents will start to grow old. You don't realise it's happening, but then one day, you wake up and hear loud coughs coming from your parents' room. It creeps up on you so suddenly that it leaves most people overwhelmed. You start to notice how they cannot walk like they used to, how they talk differently, and if you ever had to take them to a hospital, the realisation comes like a lightning strike.

And there is nothing any of us can do about it because time takes its toll on all. All we can do is be there for them, try to make them proud.

If you get married, more things will change. You will have a partner and more responsibilities. As selfish as it sounds, you will have very little time for 'me' and more responsibilities for 'we'.

If you have children, then you will become a family person. From being a child yourself to being responsible for a child — maybe that is called growing up?

Where did that money go?

If you are unemployed, you start to realise how cruel the world is. If you are employed, you realise you need to be more calculative with your money. There is this magical phenomenon in our adult years where you get paid, and the next day you check your bank account to find that you have one hundred and twenty takas left.

It could be rent, it could be grocery shopping, it could be hospital bills, it could be dues for your credit card. Or it could be a hundred other things, and you learn to get by within a budget. Because you are an adult now. Sure, you can buy a tub of chocolate with your money, but you choose not to because there are other things that need money. You learn to prioritise.

Learning to let go

As we grow older, there are a lot of things that we have to let go of. No matter how much we want to hold on to them. I used to love gaming as a child. Now, even though I have the instruments for gaming, I just cannot find the time to game. And I hate it. Now I have to think twice before staying up to watch a football match because the next day I might wake up feeling like a zombie. But once upon a time, I used to pull all-nighters like it was just another Tuesday.

I don't remember being so tired all the time, and I don't remember being so grumpy and annoyed. I remember sneering at grumpy adults, and now I have become one of them.

Maybe that is the real struggle of growing up — turning into everything you used to hate?

Illustration: Ashif Ahmed Rudro