Chronically Uncertified (or The Long-Lived Scam We Call Maturity)

• A sharp satirical essay on the construct of adulthood and the essence it conceals.

We’re born as so-called children, and at a certain point we’re suddenly considered adults. One word is replaced by another, one label by the next—you’re stripped of your comically colored beanie with a little propeller and handed a self-important-looking briefcase, monogrammed with your initials and containing a list of new rules that have just come into effect.

Usually, this transition is dictated by others—once we finish school, once we get a job, once we assume responsibility for our lives and start paying our own bills. After sex, after the first period, once we get a driver’s license, once we prove we won’t get lost in a foreign city. Once we learn from our first big mistake. Or once you climb a mountain, sink your teeth into a giant predator, and drink all the eggs from its nest. These “once you…” moments differ wildly across families, mentors, cultures, and creeds—and we’re expected to feel something because of them.

I remember how my grandpa tried (unsuccessfully) to teach me how to snap a rabbit’s neck with a single blow from the edge of my hand—because apparently, a grown man from the village should know how to do that. I remember having to handle my first bureaucratic task on my own. Buying my first condoms. Learning how to inhale a cigarette properly. Downing my first shot of rum in front of my friends without throwing up. Driving a car alone for the first time on my way to university. There were many such rites of passage—and looking back, the ones that take place in indigenous tribes make a lot more sense than those barreling over one another in what we call civilized society.

You’re standing in the middle of a busy street, battered by judgmental glances like a rock in a turbulent river. This thing we call adulthood is mainly about meeting the expectations of others—of society at large—and your performance is constantly, and often mercilessly, evaluated.

Supposedly, only once you grow up will you finally be enough…

“This is not how an adult behaves.”

“You’re an adult, deal with it.”

“You’re acting like a child—pull yourself together.”

“Stop whining like a kid.”

How many checkpoints must you reach before someone hands you the certificate of adulthood? And who gets to decide? Anyone who already has theirs—or who simply feels adult enough.

As children, we’re gradually weighed down by expectations, responsibilities, social norms, rules, laws, the projected dreams of our parents—and our own ever-shifting idea of what adulthood means. All of it sticks to us as we walk through life like little paper notes, until the child buried underneath is no longer visible.

But every now and then, the pure kid peeks out—from under all that build-up. In moments of pure joy or uncontrollable rage. In illness, when there’s no energy left for performance and all your body and mind can do is try to heal—suddenly there’s no room left for social games. When we get drunk with friends and, under layers of daily frustration, suddenly feel the need to do something spontaneous, something completely stupid. When we get the urge to moon someone. When we scream at the top of our lungs in the car after work like an enraged toddler. When we get the impulse to steal something trivial from a store—just to see what happens. When we let out a loud fart into the silence among a group of suit-clad men volleying business jargon.

Actually, the child in us peeks through more often than we admit—because childhood never really leaves us. We just learn how to hide it—in a grand game whose rules are drilled into us over and over again.

And as we age, the glue on those little paper notes dries up. They start to fall off. And we begin to reveal our eternal child once again.

In a tired, slowly wearing-out body, we return to our essence—both biologically and psychologically.

In the end, we’re children again—but this time without parents we trust unconditionally, who could tell us any old story just to keep us quiet, to pull us into the game where we’re easier to control. And even if they did—we see through all the games now. And the nonsense rules are harder and harder to follow, simply because the material is worn out.

Old people don’t fart in public out of rebellion anymore—they just do it, because “they’re just farts, Jesus Christ, what’s the big deal?” Some grumpy guy has no problem speaking up when someone tells him something he couldn’t care less about. Grandma in the care home is convinced her barely-mobile roommate steals her puddings at night and is plotting against her—and you won’t talk her out of it. An old man “parked” in a deep armchair slams his cane against the legs of the nearby table and growls, because he no longer knows how else to express that he simply won’t eat “that goddamn purée” for the hundred and fiftieth time.

Life travels in a circle. It ends where it began. And the child within us is present at every single point along that circle—because it never actually became an adult. The child is the true form of life. Adulthood is a construct. Just so you know. You bastards...