I’ve realized something mildly alarming about adulthood: at some point, without any formal announcement, the buck starts stopping with you. Apparently, I need an adult. Unfortunately, after looking around, it appears that adult is me.
I’m not sure when this happened. I remember being younger and assuming there would eventually be some invisible transition into fully formed adulthood. One day, I would simply know how insurance worked. I would understand every suspicious sound coming from the house. I would confidently fill out forms without rereading them six times. I would know whether something could be fixed with glue or whether glue would turn a small problem into a much more expensive one.
I am still waiting for that transformation.
The problem is, everyone else seems to think it already happened. So now when something goes wrong, there is no higher authority to appeal to. The appliance starts making a noise, something is leaking, a weird letter shows up in the mail, the pool starts doing something inexplicable, or a piece of technology suddenly stops cooperating, and somehow the answer is always the same.
Me.
The buck stops here. I am, apparently, the buck stopper.
That feels like a lot of responsibility for someone who still occasionally walks into a room and forgets why she went there.
And yet, most of the time, I figure it out. Maybe not gracefully and definitely not always on the first try, but eventually. Sometimes that means Googling. Sometimes it means finding a YouTube video made by a man named Steve in a garage who somehow becomes the most important person in my life for twelve minutes. Sometimes it means calling someone who actually knows what they are doing and asking them to explain it to me like I am five.
But eventually, the thing gets handled.
That is the part that keeps making me rethink what competence actually looks like. I always assumed adulthood would feel like certainty. Instead, it often feels like being handed increasingly complicated situations while maintaining a facial expression that suggests this is all perfectly normal.
There is a little impostor syndrome mixed into that too. You can be educated, experienced, responsible, and perfectly capable, and still have moments where you think, Surely someone else should be making this decision. Someone older. Someone more qualified. Someone who has a clipboard.
Then you look around and realize, no. Still you.
Maybe that is one of the strange secrets of adulthood. Competence does not always feel like competence. Sometimes it looks like being confused, asking questions, reading instructions, making a decision, and hoping you did not accidentally void a warranty in the process.
The adults I thought had everything figured out probably did not feel nearly as certain as they looked. They were just the buck stoppers before me.
Maybe growing up is not finally knowing everything. Maybe it is realizing you do not have to know everything before you can be the person who handles it. You just need to figure out the next thing.
Apparently, that counts.
Which is good, because I checked again.
There is still no other adult coming.
😐 Charlotte