Happy Wednesday, friend!

You are reading The How to Live Newsletter: Your weekly guide offering insights from psychology to help you navigate life’s challenges, one Wednesday at a time.

My friend, the inimitable anxiety expert, Tamar Chansky, wrote today’s post.

7 Misbeliefs About What it Means to be an Adult

What does it mean to be an adult?

Amanda posed this question to me recently, and as you’ll see, I was ready with some answers—from my patients to my own life, this question has been on my mind.

Especially at this time.

This unprecedented moment of facing unhealed wounds and ongoing challenges in a world that keeps shaking our foundations as we try desperately to, as is our nature, seek and see predictability, or reinvent a sense of safety that allows us to continue every day.

Raise your hand if you have felt like a child these past years, wishing someone would come along and say it would be OK.

I must put my hand down to type, but I’m right there. We are not going to feel OK a lot of the time. This reality flies in the face of a long-held myth of adulthood—that being an adult means generally having your sh!t together at all times.

That is a myth. The mother of all myths about adulthood.

In our individual lives and collectively over the last few years, we’ve seen how life can bring us to our knees. And that’s OK, because that is truly what it means to be an adult sometimes. We can be undone by life and then somehow wake up the next morning (or some morning thereafter) and get up and go.

See, we have already dispelled one myth.

I’ve heard this refrain from patients of all ages: fledgling adults in their 20s, seasoned ones in their 50s and 60s, and even seniors in their 70s.

Each of them felt what anyone might in life’s journey—utterly lost, achingly vulnerable, frightened, mortally embarrassed, profoundly overwhelmed, and desperately confused about how to move forward. I am also ashamed and apologize for having those very feelings because a real, competent, legitimate adult would never feel like that.

Their anxiety is not distinct from yours or mine.

These are universal experiences we face, finding the will to scale the daunting wall of an ordinary day, or when we are facing bigger decisions or simply the question of our existence.

As I said to one young person this week, anyone who stops and thinks about how we are alive may “freak out.” But with lots of practice over time, you can learn to regroup, reset, and with a big “Yes, AND” (Yes, life can feel scary AND that’s OK because there’s nothing I need to do about it right now), carry on.

Yet, somehow, we think we aren’t supposed to do that. We aren’t supposed to feel lost, scared, need support, lonely, or any of those things. That’s kids’ stuff. “Grow up!” our inner judge might say accusingly.

“How old are you?” we might hear in our mind.

New answer: I am exactly the right age I need to be.

As it turns out, one of the challenges of the human condition that is more easily fixable than others is removing the self-judgment we feel for reacting “wrong.” That’s a layer off the burdens we already feel that we can lift off right now.

Judgment is painful, and it’s a distraction from solving whatever lies beneath that judge-y surface.

So let’s get a few things straight:

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