On adulting and taking responsibility

One of my favourite movies, is a 1988 film with Tom Hanks called Big. It is the story of a boy who goes to a carnival and makes a wish to be an adult and then his wish is granted. He wakes up the next morning in an adult body and then must navigate the world whilst trapped in an adult body. At first, he loves being an adult, because he believes he now gets to do all the fun things he wants to do, without other adults telling him that he is not allowed to do them. But eventually, being an adult becomes too hard, and he wants to go back to his life as a little kid.

I feel as if most of us wish we could go back to being kids. We long for those days of carefree bliss and mischief and we resent having to adult. I often come across these memes on social media that joke about what it means to be an adult. I’m sure you’ve seen some of them. The key themes tend to include finding it hard to be a responsible adult and make decisions, not knowing what you want to do with your life, or feeling like you have no clue what you are doing, feeling tired all the time, realising you are old, and getting excited about mundane things like clean dishes, dish sponges, or getting to go to bed early.

We joke about having to be an adult, but I’m guessing that many of us also secretly feel like we have no idea what we are doing. In fact, I’m willing to go as far as saying that no-one really knows what they are doing. We are all just trying to figure it out, while we hope to come across as if we do know what we are doing.

You see, the truth is that life doesn’t come with an instruction manual. We are meant to figure it out by ourselves. And yet so many of us believe that we are supposed to know what to do and that admitting that we don’t know what we are doing, would be like admitting we have failed as human beings.

Brené Brown says, “If you put shame in a Petri dish, it needs three things to grow exponentially: secrecy, silence and judgment. If you put the same amount of shame in a Petri dish and douse it with empathy, it can’t survive.”

The more we stay silent, the more we feel we must hide our insecurities, or the more we judge ourselves for not knowing something there was no way for us to know anyway, the deeper our shame gets. Shame has us hiding and feeling in adequate and buying into a narrative that says we are not enough.

When I hear a client sharing a version of the “not enough” story, I ask them, “What’s enough?” and usually they either pause and then say they don’t know, or they end up describing some inhumane level of perfection that needs to be aspired to.

Usually people don’t know what’s enough, because they have been so conditioned to feel not enough, that they’ve never considered the question, “What’s enough?”. You see when you are running a soundtrack of not enough in your head, then nothing is ever enough. Believing that you are not enough means you will spend the rest of your life trying to become enough, trying to prove that you are enough, or trying to earn your worth, and never getting there, because enough has not been quantified or defined. Living out the narrative of not enough simply means that you always fall short no matter WHAT you do. It sets you up to run an endless loop like a hamster on a wheel that goes nowhere.

I spent many years of my life living out a not enough story. In fact, for me, I think it’s part of my lifelong spiritual curriculum. I now have more moments where I feel enough, or where I know I am enough, or I have done enough. And still, I will have moments where I step right back into not being enough or feeling I need to prove my worth or earn my worth.

What helped me see and reach a different perspective on enoughness, was my children, believe it or not. Think about how most people respond when they see a baby. Some are not fond of babies, but most people will coo and fawn over a baby and attribute all kinds of wonderful things to the baby. We call babies sweet, special, wonderful, and adorable, etc. We value them. In fact, some of us value them so much that we overhaul our entire lives to have them and raise them.

And yet, from a practical standpoint, based on the “rules” of society, babies are not really all that valuable. Think about it. If we measure babies against the same “rules” that we hold for ourselves to feel valuable, then babies would come out on the losing end, because they are basically just squishy things that eat, poop, drool, and sleep a lot. They don’t ADD any value. They don’t have skills, or talents. They don’t contribute to the economy. They don’t work or earn a salary. They are not even able to converse intelligibly. Measured against these rules, they are most certainly NOT ENOUGH.

And yet, we treat them as MORE THAN ENOUGH. We treat them as more precious than almost everything in our lives. We love and protect them. We care deeply. We make big sacrifices. We sacrifice sleep, food, time for ourselves, money, energy, etc. Why do we do this?

It’s simple. On a deeper intrinsic level, we KNOW that babies are valuable because they exist. We know that worth is not measured by what we do, but by who we ARE. Babies remind us of our spiritual nature. They remind us of innocence and of potential. They invite us to dream again.

Self-worth is not on a dimmer switch that goes up or down with an increase in intelligence, or income, or prestige. We are conditioned to believe that that is true, but it’s not. Our worth is intrinsic to the fact that we exist. You were enough when you were a baby. Your mere existence in this realm made you worthy. And you are still enough.

Life is valuable and precious no matter what form it takes. You are valuable because you are alive. That’s it. And if you think about the people in your life that matter the most to you, I’d be wiling to bet you don’t value them for their title, their money, their prestige, or success. You probably value them for who they ARE. You value who they are being, and how that impacts your life. The most important people in our lives are the ones we love for who they are and the ones who make us feel seen, heard, and loved. Their being is what has us love them, not their doing.

And yet, each of us has a story running about what we are supposed to be doing to earn our worth or to be enough. And if you have that story running persistently, it leads to shame, self-judgment, and the judgment of others. Think about it, why do you actually feel the need to judge others? We judge others because we judge ourselves. And judging others helps us feel better about ourselves, even if it’s only temporary. It eases some of the shame, pain, and discomfort we feel about our own inadequacies.

So, if this is all true, then what are we to do here? How do we stop feeling shame and guilt? And how do we stop trying to prove ourselves?

I don’t know if it’s possible to switch it off entirely. I think to a certain extent, it’s hard-wired into us. What I do know is that when I slow down to ask that question, “What’s enough?”, and when I let myself off the hook for not knowing something, I feel less shame.

See, I’ve also discovered that so many of us – most of my clients and myself included – have this false narrative running that says we should know what to do in any given situation or we should have done something different to what we did. When we discover that we made a mistake, or we made a “bad decision”, we tend to beat up on ourselves for not knowing better.

But let’s slow that down for a second. At the time when you made the choice or made a “mistake”, were you doing your best? I’m willing to bet that you were. You were doing the best you knew how to at the time. No-one wakes up in the morning and sets the intention to fail and not do their best. We are all trying to do the best we can with what we know and have.

And sometimes by going through certain experiences, we discover that what we thought would work, doesn’t. We learn new things, we gain new insights, we realise there is a different way to do something. And that’s when most of my clients would then get angry at themselves and beat up on themselves for not doing the thing they just became aware of in this moment.

How could you have done something in the past that you only discovered or became aware of now? We cannot change the past. My coach always says, it was always going to happen that way, because it did. There is nothing to be done about things that have already happened.

The only thing we control is the decision we make in this moment and the future we create as a result, because the future isn’t written. It is being written with every decision we make in the now. So, when you do know better, then do better. When you finally do have a new awareness about something, choose to put it into action in your life NOW.

I also want to point out that often it’s the things we consider “mistakes” or “bad choices” that lead us to these new insights; that help us learn and grow and discover who we are and what we are actually capable of. I can choose to see them as mistakes, or I can choose to see them as learning opportunities. Choosing to see mistakes, gets me stuck in an endless loop of feeling like a failure and feeling like I’m not enough. Choosing to see learning opportunities, gets me excited about trying out new things, about taking risks, about moving forward, because with every step I take, I grow, I learn, I become a better version of myself, and I create my future.

I started off this article by talking about what it means to be an adult and how most of us feel like we don’t know what we are doing. And what I recently discovered, is that it’s because we don’t understand what it means to be an adult. Like I said, there is no instruction manual for life, so there is no universally agreed upon definition for what it means to be an adult. We’ve heard that adulting is equated with responsibility, but even there we have a misconception about what responsibility actually means.

The word “responsibility” can be broken down into to parts.

RESPONSE and ABLE. In any situation, I am able to choose my response. Victor Frankl says it best when he says, “Between stimulus and response there is a space.  In that space is our power to choose our response.  In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

In every situation, I get to choose how I want to respond. I get to choose who I want to be. And when I realise that, when I start to recognise my own power to CREATE my world, that’s when I become an adult. When I know that I can choose my response and that life is calling me to respond, that’s when I grow up.

I recently read Erich Fromm’s book, The Art of Being, and the part that stuck with me was something along the lines of “once you realise that you are responsible for your own life, that’s when you grow up”.

So here is the truth. No-one is coming to save you. You are it. And YOU are responsible for the life YOU create and live. YOU are the hero you’ve been waiting for. And once you see that; once you recognise your own power to choose, you finally become an adult.

If you were to take full responsibility for your own life and happiness, what would you do? Who would you be? What habits and stories would you need to drop to take full ownership of your life and happiness?

References:

1. Fromm, E. (1992). The Art of Being.