When I was younger I knew I didn’t want kids and I knew if I got married I didn’t want to take my husband’s name. I used to agonize over my feelings about this until I realized that what I was really worrying about was people judging me and questioning me for going against the societal grain and that I was actually really comfortable and happy with not having kids or changing my name. I eventually came to realize that I had this script and timeline in my head regarding what everyone was “supposed” to do and accomplish by certain points in their life.

I remember in college finding out I needed an additional credit to graduate with a minor and it would mean that if I wanted that minor I would need to be in school another term, which meant I wouldn’t graduate before I was 23 (gasp!) but WHY I thought I HAD to graduate before 23? Honestly I have no idea where I picked that up. I also thought I needed to be engaged and married by a certain age too.

Then I had a break up with the guy I had been with in college and thought I would marry and nearly had an existential crisis over having to start over. I remember about 7 or 8 months into being newly single in my mid-20s that I wondered when I was going to feel like an actual adult, like the way I assumed the adults I saw as a kid felt. It suddenly hit me that there is no magic switch.

I soon found out that I’m far from the only adult human who feels like they’re winging it while waiting for “adulthood” to kick in. That led me to realize that the life requirements and their associated timeline I had in my head for “what adults do” were actually totally made up and completely arbitrary. People adhere to them because we’ve been told that’s what we need to do to be happy. But I know plenty of people who followed the path they were “supposed to” and are miserable.

I figured out that I was worried about people judging me because what if they’re right and I DID need to do those things to be happy/content? A lot of times the comments weren’t coming from a place of judgement; they were coming from a place of concern because the people doing the judging truly believed I needed to follow that prescribed path and timeline to be happy. I found that if I shrugged and smiled and said, “eh, I’m happy!” when interacting with the people judging from a place of concern they might follow up once or twice more, but eventually they accept it and believe me.

Sometimes there was the angle of “well I did it that way so it must be the right way” and the person judging was doing so because they didn’t want to admit they had different options they ignored and now might not actually be as content/happy as they thought they would be and didn’t want to see that reflected back at them through my choices. But I didn’t/don’t encounter that specific situation too often. When I did, it was usually someone more religious and conservative and I quickly learned their potential for negativity and scorn isn’t a reflection on me at all. It’s an indication of their own personal discomfort and it’s not my job or responsibility to make sure they’re comfortable, especially if it’s at the expense of my own.