by


Being  “ADULT”
Essay

Even adults cannot call themselves adults, I believe.

The word “adult” entails a lot of responsibilities before we can call them one. Physiologically, humans can achieve maturity but not psychologically.

Notice how persons we usually described as adults still act childish or childlike. It is because these characteristics are innate in us. It makes our world a better and interesting place to live in. Imagine the world with people acting maturely. I wonder if there would be harmony. It sounds cool but life would appear black and white.

When I searched the meaning of “adult,” most dictionaries define it as humans who are fully-grown or develop. I assumed what the dictionaries is clearly defining is the physical maturity of a person and being legally dependent, and not the mental and emotional state of a human being.

Humans never became fully grown psychologically. No matter how we strive, we will never be become one. Being fully develop means having no weakness or lacking, in short, perfectness. There are no such human as perfect. We all have weakness. It will exist no matter how we strive to become one.

Adult, for me, is a vague term to describe a person even he or she reached the age of 18 or 21, because those who deserved to be called as such are those who smoothly handles and understands every aspect of life. And no one is such. We all have shortcomings, which served as our alarm whenever we forgot the term “being human.”These mistakes shaped us into a better person but still depend on how we handle them – either positively or negatively. 

This is how life works, and the reason why inequalities exist, and why there is such thing as hard work.

The definition we gave on the world “adult” appears on the way we judge those persons we characterized as adults. We expect them to be fully-grown or should I call it “perfect,” who can fully understand life and others. We expect them to be the expert of life, the person who can fully understand us most.  But we all got it wrong. They are also human, living in a world of peculiarity and inequalities. And who will always possess the word “limitations.”

Therefore, we must not associate adult in a definition that suppose to define the physical maturity of a person. It is because a human mind and emotion could never be contained in a single definition. It can be summarized in a series of paragraph but can never be fully understood, which what makes our life complicated and mysterious.

Our characteristics vary, and a single lifetime is not enough to understand the complexities of how human mind and emotion works – the reason why we never stopped studying the human brain, and why no matter how we try to be open-minded we always commit mistake.

Man usually despises or looks down on adults who act childish and childlike. It is funny how we act and judge them like they are perfect without blemishes o flaws. We do not know or try to believe that life is a process full of bizarre occurrences. And not everyone act or think like a certain person do, a reason why inequalities exist.