You Don't Owe Anyone Adulthood

Nobody asked me if I wanted to be an adult. They just handed me the script and expected me to perform it. Eye contact. Small talk. A career trajectory. The ability to make phone calls without rehearsing them twelve times. A general sense that I knew what I was doing and where I was going. I never had any of those things. I still don't. And I've decided that's fine.

The whole idea of adulthood is a social contract. A set of expectations that everyone agreed to at some point without asking whether it worked for everyone. It doesn't. It never did. It especially doesn't work for people whose brains were never going to fit into the mold in the first place. Autistic people. ADHD people. Trauma survivors. People who were forced to grow up too fast and then just... stopped. People who looked at the prize at the end of the race — a mortgage, a retirement plan, the slow erosion of curiosity — and said no thanks.

They Told Me What Normal Looked Like

I was diagnosed autistic when I was five. I was non-verbal. I couldn't tell anyone what I needed so I screamed and hit and melted down until someone figured it out. And then I learned to talk and everyone acted like the problem was solved. But it wasn't. The problem was never that I couldn't talk. The problem was that the world expected me to talk in a certain way, to make eye contact in a certain way, to sit still in a certain way, and my body never learned how to do any of that.

I went to a specialized school eventually. After my mom fought the school board and won. That school saved me. Small classes. Sensory rooms. Teachers who understood that communication isn't just words. And I graduated. I got a job at Bruce's bookstore running their ecommerce. Twenty thousand items in a database and my brain knows where every single one is. I'm good at my job. I'm good at my life. I just don't look like what anyone expected.

The Performance Is Exhausting

For years I tried to do it the normal way. I masked. I made the eye contact. I learned the small talk scripts. I sat still while every cell in my body was telling me to move. And I was exhausted. All the time. Not tired like I needed a nap. Exhausted like I was running a program my hardware wasn't built for and it was slowly burning out the processor.

That's what adulthood feels like for a lot of us. A program we're running that we didn't write. An operating system we didn't choose. And every few years someone releases an update — you should be married by now, you should own a house by now, you should have a five-year plan — and we download it and try to install it and it crashes. Every time. It's not because we're broken. It's because the software was never designed for our hardware.

You Can Opt Out

Here's the thing nobody told me. You can just... not. You don't have to perform adulthood. You don't have to own a house or have a five-year plan or know what you're doing with your life. You can just be a person. A person who works and pays bills and also watches cartoons and sleeps with a stuffed animal and needs things explained differently and can't make phone calls without a script. Those things can coexist. They've always coexisted. The only problem is that someone convinced us they couldn't.

Bruce never asked me to be normal. He saw the way my brain worked with the inventory — this systematic, detail-oriented, pattern-matching thing that makes databases feel like a language I was born speaking — and he hired me. Not in spite of being autistic. Because of it. He's in his seventies and he's never once asked me to make eye contact. That's not a small thing. That's everything.

You don't owe anyone adulthood. Not the version they're selling. Not the version that requires you to mask until you crash. Not the version that says softness is weakness and comfort objects are for children and joy is something you're supposed to outgrow. You can build a life that fits your hardware. You can find people who don't need you to perform. You can stop running the update that keeps crashing. You can just... be. Whatever that looks like for you. It's allowed. It always was.

— Michael

About the Author

Michael was diagnosed autistic at five and non-verbal until they were five. They work at an independent bookstore where they run the entire ecommerce operation. They live in Virginia and are still learning to separate the guilt that doesn't belong to them from the self they're building.