I am 22 years old and there are already so many mistakes I’ve made that I wish I could go back and fix. And these aren’t childish regrets like “I wish I’d told that barista he was cute” or buying something just before it went on sale. I wasn’t taught how to do anything pertaining to adulthood. I’m $4000 in debt, struggling to find and keep a well-paying job, on the verge of losing my apartment, and barely keeping myself and my fiancé fed (with great thanks to friends who offer what they can to help).
No one taught me to fill out applications for work; my mother created an Indeed account for me and said “good luck”. No one taught me how to file my taxes; I downloaded TurboTax and hoped I was doing it right (I still don’t think I am). I was never taught to budget, how to buy a car, how to apply for a credit card, or an apartment, or a loan, how to create a resume or even find a job I actually want, and, honestly, I was never even taught about sex, nor was I sent to a school with a sex ed/health class, I had to hear about it from friends and fill in the blanks myself.
I was raised by a toxic narcissist parent, my mother, who, to this day, attempts to buy my love with money for bills and supplies for our shared recreational activity. Instead of helping me feel comfortable with intimacy, or even my own growing body, she made snide comments about how I ate too much and too often until she could make comments about how sickly skinny I had started to look and accused me of being a slut when I went to hang out with my group of guy friends. But let’s not focus on her character just yet, I’ll elaborate on that in the future.
My point is that, if I’m correct, a good majority of my generation is fucking clueless about how to be an adult. If the rest of my generation is anything like me, their parents set everything up for them and then got pissed when their children didn’t know how to do it themselves. And, for some reason, we’re NORMALIZING being clueless as to how to live even slightly stable lives. If I could write a how-to handbook, I would. Because I want to have children, but I am scared to bring them into this world when I don’t know how to prepare them better than I was prepared.
We have reached a point of all or nothing; our parents either give everything to us without letting us work for it, or we don’t get it at all. I know several young adults that have had 2 or 3 different cars in their lives and weren’t there to sign the paperwork on any of them, whereas I have never had a car and have never been taught to get one or how to get insurance for one.
So I’ll ask you this, dear reader: why are we getting punished in life for not being taught things we weren’t aware we had to learn? Why are we getting thrown in the deep end before we knew the pool existed? Why do we stare down the barrel of eviction and starvation and lifelong debt because someone couldn’t tell us when we were 10 years old to save all the checks and gift cards we got for birthdays and Christmas because one day we would really need them? (And on another note, why do we stop receiving money as gifts when we actually start to need it???)
The Pearly Gates of Hell 