I really feel like life has catastrophically under-prepared me for adulthood. And before you roll your eyes and mutter something about participation trophies and entitlement, let me clarify: I'm not talking about the usual complaints. We're all painfully aware of how spectacularly unprepared we were for the real world after high school. I saw a meme on social media not long ago thanking the school system for teaching square dancing but not teaching how to do taxes, noting the education "came in handy" during square dancing season. Spoiler alert: square dancing season has yet to arrive in my adult life, but Tax Day shows up with the punctuality of a German train.
But this goes deeper than taxes and mortgages and understanding what a 401(k) actually is (I'm still not entirely sure, if I'm being honest). There are so many things I just didn't realize I didn't know or realize I needed to know. Now, yes, of course we grow and learn things as we mature – makes sense. That's supposedly how being human works. But there are some things I still haven't grasped, and I'm starting to suspect I never will. I'm beginning to think there's a secret handbook everyone else received at some point, probably while I was out sick with the flu in third grade, and now I'm just stumbling through life hoping no one notices I'm winging it.
Take socks, for instance. When do you finally throw away the lone sock? When do you finally give up on finishing the match and just toss it in the trash? Is there a statute of limitations on sock grief? I have a drawer – no, let me be honest, I have two drawers – filled with orphaned socks. Some have been waiting for their partners for years. YEARS. I keep them because what if the missing one shows up? What if I'm doing laundry one day and there it is, stuck to the inside of a pillowcase or hiding in the fitted sheet like some kind of cotton witness protection program? But it never shows up. The reunion never happens. And yet I can't bring myself to throw them away because the moment I do, you know the other sock will materialize just to mock me.
Is there a support group for this? Do other adults lie awake at night wondering about their sock inventory? Or did everyone else get the memo about when to let go and move on?
And don't even get me started on kitchen organization. How exactly are you supposed to organize the spice cupboard or the pantry? I've seen those beautiful photos on Pinterest and Instagram where everything is in matching jars with hand-lettered labels and arranged alphabetically or by cuisine type or by color in some kind of spice rainbow. My spice cupboard looks like a disaster relief zone. I've got three half-empty containers of cinnamon because I keep forgetting I already have cinnamon and buying more cinnamon. I have spices I don't even remember purchasing. There's a jar of something called "grains of paradise" in there. When did I buy grains of paradise? What are grains of paradise? What dish requires grains of paradise? I'm afraid to Google it because I'll discover it's a crucial ingredient in some recipe I'll never make, and then I'll feel guilty about the grains of paradise languishing unused in my cupboard.
And the pantry? The pantry is where food goes to be forgotten until it expires. I practice what I call "archaeological pantry management," where I occasionally excavate the back shelves and discover cans of water chestnuts from 2019 and boxes of pasta in shapes I don't remember buying. There's currently a can of chickpeas in my pantry with a best-by date during the Obama administration. I'm not saying which Obama term, but I am saying I should probably do something about it.
But perhaps the greatest unsolved mystery of adult domestic life is this: where exactly did all the Tupperware lids go? All I did was put them in the dishwasher and now the lid is gone. Vanished. Disappeared into the same void where my socks presumably ended up. I have seventeen containers and four lids, and none of the lids fit any of the containers. It's like someone is running an underground Tupperware lid trafficking ring, and my kitchen is the primary target.
I've started to believe in a parallel universe where there's a version of me who has all the lids and none of the containers, and she's equally frustrated. Maybe we're quantum entangled, she and I, forever cursed to have incomplete food storage solutions. Sometimes I imagine her standing in her kitchen, holding a lid, screaming "WHERE ARE ALL THE CONTAINERS?" while I stand in my kitchen holding a container and screaming "WHERE ARE ALL THE LIDS?" We're cosmically connected through our mutual inadequacy.
Nobody warned me about this stuff. High school prepared me for exactly none of this. I can tell you about the mitochondria (it's the powerhouse of the cell, in case you forgot), and I can poorly execute a square dance if absolutely necessary, but I cannot for the life of me figure out when to replace the sponge by the sink. Is it when it starts to smell? When it disintegrates? When it becomes sentient and demands its freedom? I've been using the same sponge for what might be three months, and I'm afraid to ask anyone if this is normal because I suspect it's not.
And what about plants? Everyone online seems to be a plant parent these days, nurturing succulents and fiddle leaf figs and calling them by name like they're beloved pets. I've killed cacti. CACTI. Plants specifically designed to survive in deserts where it doesn't rain for months. I watered mine exactly according to the instructions, and it died anyway. I'm convinced it took one look at me and decided it didn't want to be part of my household. I don't blame it.
Then there's the whole matter of small talk with neighbors. How much are you supposed to know about your neighbors? I know my neighbor's name is either Jeff or Greg – I've been too afraid to ask for clarification after the first six months – and I know he has a dog named something with two syllables. We've lived next to each other for three years. We wave. We comment on the weather. "Hot enough for you?" "Cold out there!" "Some rain we're having!" But I don't know what he does for a living or if he's married or if he's plotting to take over the world from his garage. Is this normal? Should I know more? Should I bake him cookies? Is that still a thing people do, or is it now considered weird to show up at someone's door with homemade food? These are the questions nobody prepared me for.
Grocery shopping is another minefield of adult uncertainty. How do you know when an avocado is ripe? I've read the guides. I've watched the videos. I've gently squeezed thousands of avocados at this point in my life. And yet, I'm still surprised fifty percent of the time when I cut one open. It's either concrete or it's basically guacamole inside the skin with no in-between. There's apparently a seventeen-minute window when an avocado is perfectly ripe, and I've never once hit it. Not once in my entire adult life.
And while we're on the subject of produce, who decided tomatoes should be stored at room temperature? I was thirty-two years old when someone told me I'd been refrigerating tomatoes incorrectly my entire life. Thirty-two! For three decades, I was allegedly ruining tomatoes, and nobody said anything. How many other foods am I storing wrong? Is there a cheese I'm keeping too cold? A fruit I should be refrigerating? I live in fear of dinner party judgment, though to be honest, I don't host dinner parties because I don't know how to be an adult who hosts dinner parties.
What do you serve at a dinner party anyway? Do you have courses? Multiple forks? Do people still do multiple forks, or is it just in movies? How much wine do you need? What if someone doesn't drink? What if someone's vegetarian? What if someone's vegetarian AND gluten-free AND allergic to nuts? Do I need to become a professional chef to have people over for dinner? Is Costco lasagna acceptable, or is there some adult code of conduct I'm violating?
Nobody taught me how to negotiate a salary or how to know when to take my car to the mechanic versus when I'm being scammed. Nobody explained what "business casual" actually means (is it business that's casual or casual that's business-y?), or how to network without feeling like a soul-sucking automaton trading LinkedIn connections for the illusion of professional success.
I don't know the right amount to tip for various services. I over-tip out of anxiety and guilt. The pizza delivery person probably thinks I'm either very generous or very bad at math. Both are true, honestly. I don't know when you're supposed to call a plumber versus when you can fix it yourself with YouTube and optimism. I've made some regrettable decisions in this department. My bathroom ceiling remembers them all.
I don't know how people afford furniture. Real furniture. Furniture from actual furniture stores instead of whatever was cheapest on Amazon or abandoned on the curb with a "FREE" sign. I'm forty percent sure the couch I'm sitting on right now is held together by hope and nostalgia. But grown-up furniture costs more than my first car, and I can't quite wrap my head around spending $3,000 on a sofa when I could spend $300 and simply accept a lower quality of life.
Here's what I think happened: somewhere along the way, there was supposed to be a class. "Adulting 101" or something. It was supposed to meet on Tuesdays at 2 p.m., and it would cover all of this. The socks. The Tupperware. The avocados. The appropriate length of time to keep takeout containers before washing them or admitting defeat and throwing them away. When to replace towels. How often to wash bedsheets (I looked this up recently and was horrified to learn I've been doing it wrong). The difference between baking soda and baking powder and why it matters. How to fold a fitted sheet, though I'm convinced this is a myth and no one actually knows how.
But I missed it. We all missed it. We were too busy memorizing the quadratic formula and learning about the Treaty of Westphalia, and nobody thought to mention that we'd need to know how to unclog a toilet at 11 p.m. on a Sunday when no plumber is available and panic is setting in.
So here we are, a generation of people with college degrees and strong opinions about streaming services, but we can't figure out when to throw away Tupperware without a lid. We're professionals in our fields, competent at our jobs, capable of complex thought and analysis, but we've got a drawer full of orphaned socks and we're pretty sure we're doing laundry wrong.
The truth is, I think we're all just pretending. Every single adult is just winging it and hoping nobody notices. The people with the organized spice racks? They're faking it. They bought those jars once for a photo, and now there's probably a jumble of plastic spice containers shoved in a cabinet somewhere else. The people with matching Tupperware? Actors hired for commercials. It's all an elaborate conspiracy.
And maybe that's okay. Maybe the secret to adulthood isn't having all the answers. Maybe it's accepting you'll never have all the answers and being fine with that. Maybe it's keeping the orphaned socks for years because hope is free and drawer space is abundant. Maybe it's Costco lasagna for dinner parties and cacti that die despite your best efforts.
Maybe we're all just doing the best we can with the education we got, which included square dancing but not much practical life advice. And honestly? That's kind of beautiful. We're all stumbling through this together, one mismatched sock at a time.
