For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to be a grownup. As children, my friends and I would play at being shopkeepers and customers, thrilled to inhabit an adult role. As a teenager, I lived alone abroad. By my 30s I had all the things I thought signalled adulthood: a career (as a journalist), a home, a husband, a washing machine, a dishwasher and a fridge. All the paperwork and white goods to prove I was finally the competent, confident adult I had always hoped to be.
But at random moments my non-adultness would pop out, like when I opened my kitchen bin to find the lid thick and throbbing with squiggly maggots, and immediately called my mother for advice. Or when my bag was stolen and people suggested my contents insurance might cover it. What contents insurance? While I was training to be a psychodynamic psychotherapist, and as a patient in therapy myself, I had more and more of these moments where I felt so unknowing and lost. Officially, I was a grown-up thirtysomething, but at times like this my adult skin felt paper-thin. In these moments, not only did I not feel like an adult; I realised I didn’t even know what one is.
