I am a shit adult. I believe I have mentioned that before. There are, I think, several reasons for this.
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First: I grew up fairly privileged. We weren’t rich, but we certainly were not poor. The lexicon of today would probably define us as “comfortably upper-middle class.” There were lots of things I never knew how to do (Laundry, bargain shopping, bills) until I was pushed, full-formed into our lovingly capitalist system.
Early on in my on-my-own days I was sharing a studio apartment with a friend. We were poor. Eating katsup packets for dinner poor (though we always had money for booze and cigarettes). She had grown up that way, I had not. So when, after collecting my piddly paycheck as a cashier in the video department of a local grocery chain, I went and spent $350 on a purse I had been coveting, she asked me where I was going to be getting money for rent and I was flabbergasted.
Money had always been there. I had never really needed to work for it or worry about when it was coming and how much of it there was going to be. It was this instance, at 19-almost-20, that a fellow human being who had lived under the same sky for only a year more than me had to explain that an ATM was not a “money machine” as my mother called it, that would dispense $100 bills whenever I wanted them, but a machine directly tied to a bank account that only allowed you to take as much money as you actually had. Money, for the first time in my life, had not only a limit, but a purpose beyond making me happy. The purse went back, rent was paid, and my rose colored glasses view of the world was, not shattered, but certainly cracked.
It would be easy to blame my parents for this, but I can’t. They both grew up dirt poor, their parents only obtaining comfortability in their later years. My dad’s family was significantly worse than my mother’s, being from rural Arkansas. His father’s childhood home was literally built into a hole dug out of the side of a hill. My parents both obtained college educations and worked hard. They were determined that their children would never feel the want of their childhoods. And we never did. They were obsessed with providing for us all they never had and had wanted, but it was done on such a scale that it left me so unprepared for the real world that it was an impairment.
At nearly forty I still struggle with the difference between “need” and “want” and it took until my daughter’s early teens to realize that I didn’t have to put myself into debt every Holiday season, because my daughter did not care if the tree overflowed with presents as it did in my childhood, but simply that I cared. Things do not equal love. My parents, thankfully provided the latter in abundance.
Second: My mental illness has stunted me in many ways. It should come as no surprise that a mental illness can stunt you mentally, but it surprised me. A friend pointed this out.
While most people my age that I know are settling down into things like home-ownership and 401Ks, I am not. Her theory is that my mental illness put a full stop on my mental development and whenever I was deep in an episode, it would stagnate. So in my teens, I stopped. In my early twenties, I came up for a few years and progressed. Then I stopped. Rinse, wash, repeat. If I look at the timeline of my struggles with depression and anxiety and put a “stop/start” qualifier to it to determine my mental aging, I am somewhere in my mid to late 20s at the moment. I am at the age where I’m starting to realize that I need to start being serious about things and plan for the future. In reality I am a 38 year old woman with a 15 year old daughter who should have figured this all out a decade ago and be living comfortably with a view towards retirement. Instead: Savings? Wtf is that? Financial security? Ditto. Home-ownership? 😂😂😂😂 I will probably be renting until the day I die.
It is sobering and depressing. Unless you have experienced severe depression it is difficult to describe the all encompassing effect it can have on your life. It is not just being sad. It really, truly, brings everything about you (that is not biologically impossibly to do so) to a screeching halt.
I’m constantly having to remind myself that my high school years were not five years ago, but twenty. Not because time flies and all that, but because my brain is missing huge chunks of time. It just plain shut down and as far as it’s concerned 1998 was five years ago.
Third: Ah, the 90s. I am ridiculously nostalgic for it. When I saw babydoll dresses, combat boots, and scrunchies were making a comeback, I was overjoyed. I could relive my formative years vicariously through my daughter. I bought her a vintage logo Jurassic Park tee when she was around 11 and it made me….just happy. Here was something I could relate to when the rest of the world just confused me. Now, I’m sure that this can be tied back to the stagnation and isolation of my mental illness, but not entirely.
I was born in 1980. People who I consider Generation X were always five to ten years older than me. Generation Y, five to ten years younger. Millennials, a decade or more. My generation is this weird middle ground that no one can seem to quantify. Some peg me as late Generation X. Others as a very old Millennial. My generation was born in analog and matured in digital. My party days were (thankfully) free of smartphones and social media, but my childhood had conveniences and comforts that my parent’s generation could never have dreamed of.
In our teens, my friends and I dressed in a strange mishmash of styles and eras. We wore vintage band tees with country club plaid skirts. Knee high private school socks with military issue combat boots. Girls and boys both showed up to school with unwashed hair wearing shapeless plaid shirts and jeans cut in the exact same style. We wore our parent’s 70s castoff polyester shirts with jeans that cost more than their parents had made in a week of work. It was a strange time. We were a generation that completely disavowed everything our parents and “the man” stood for on a scale that had not been seen since the free love days of the 60s. Because our parents had taken the abundance and optimistic world of the 50s and 60s and turned it into a wasteland. Think I’m exaggerating?Google NYC, early 90s. Better yet, Google NYC subway, early 90s. Or Cabrini-Green.
The industrial machine of postwar had spat us out into a dystopia and we were angry. Our leaders were inept and corrupt, our infrastructure was crumbling, our environment was faltering. Being college educated didn’t garauntee you anything more than crippling debt.
We showed this anger through our fashion and music and movies. From the hardcore (any Araki movie) to the blithely escapist (Ever After).We took fashions that had, to this point, only been subcultures and brought them to the mainstream, at which point they were filtered through the fashion industry and sold back to us at four times the price we had acquired them at the Goodwill or our parent’s basements. (Looking at you Tommy Hilfiger and Hot Topic.)
The difference between us and the hippies of the 60s is that they remained a subculture. The things we tried and acquired were taken and thrown back at us for the benefit of mass consumption. Music, clothes, anything. It belonged to us and then it was sold to the many. And we disappeared behind it all. The only time I’ve seen this ambivalence to self properly represented was the wonderful 90s movie Reality Bites. Even if you are a teen or in your early 20s, I recommend that movie. You will feel seen.
On top of all that, technology was advancing at alarming rates. In a few short years we went from clunky dial up home computers to smartphones. News cycles were shortened from weeks to nanoseconds. We were growing up at the normal speed, but the world around us was in Warp drive. Nothing new was new for long. Give it a week and it would be obsolete. New things were being thrown at us at a speed that we could not could not consume them and because of all this, my generation, whatever you want to call it, got lost. The world ate us up. We disappeared into fashion houses, bankrupt shopping malls, Yahoo, eBay, Apple.
We were the guinea pigs for the world we enjoy today and when they were done with us they quietly emptied the cage behind the lab and told us to go find entry level jobs that required a degree and five years experience. Pop out a couple of kids and watch them close, but not helicopter close, and provide them with every newest thing or we were failures. They used us to experiment the current story on, but forgot to include us in the narrative.
Damn the Man.
I sound angry.
I am.
So why am I so nostalgic for it? Possibly because it was the last time I felt safe or happy. That might sound like a contradiction, but we took that dystopia and carved out safe spaces. (Check out the still achingly cool kiddie thieves den in the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie. Or Alyssa Milano’s character in the terrible, awful, horrible movie adaptation of the Double Dragon videogame. The Matrix. ‘Nuff said. ) We took the cards we were dealt and ran with it and until the world began to speed past us, for a blink of an eye, it was ours.
So, yes, I am a shit adult. The product of my upbringing, my mental illness, and the world I grew up in. I am Geocities, MIDIs, and HTML and the world around me is shiny javascript. Myspace Vs Instagram. I am trying desperately to catch up.
Damn the Man.
I sound sad.
I am.
The Art of Panic 