I love being an adult because you know what actually happens when you run your car into a curb and scratch up the bumper?
Nothing. You get it fixed, or you don’t. Whatevs.
You know what actually happens when you are depressed or sick or on your period and don’t cook dinner?
Nothing. You still get to eat something, nobody scolds you, it doesn’t have any real bearing on your future success, and you don’t get soft shunned for a week by your family.
You know what actually happens when you break stuff, forget stuff, get sick, fall asleep, are rude, miss a flight, don’t know how to do XYZ thing on fixing cars or canning food or whatever, lose things, get lost because you can’t read a map and forgot to charge your phone, buy the wrong groceries, plant the wrong plants, not make your bed, make your bed wrong, jump on your bed, sleep on your bed, eat crackers in your bed, have emotions literally anywhere?
Nothing.
Nothing happens.
No one is mad.
No one can hurt you, and if they do there are laws saying they can’t and that it’s an actual crime with legal consequences.
All there are are outcomes and different paths and different problems and different situations and you just bumble your way forward into dealing with those and that’s it. That’s the whole thing. It’s not the wrong choice, having problems isn’t indicative of your inherent badness or inadequacy or lack of applying yourself. It’s just life, and it’s happening to literally everyone.
I’m not even kidding.
You just do stuff and nothing bad happens. Walk around existing? Nothing bad will happen. Wild.
You can cry. In public. And the most likely outcome is not that you will get taken away to receive the beating of your lifetime, it is that people will mostly ignore you and some will be kinder to you. 🤯
On Saturday I got pulled over because it turned out I'd been driving on expired tags for a year and hadn't even noticed.
I got told to "take care of it soon please" and let go with a warning. Today I went to the DMV and paid a $5 late fee along with the 2-year fee for registration, got new plates and stickers and that was that.
A year late. No big deal. No one was shocked or appalled. It was just a thing that happened and then I took care of it. No biggie.
Turns out, people expect you to make mistakes because they're people and they make them too. More often than not, you can just fix them and move on.
Thank you for this lovely positive post!
I need to remember this 😚
Guys, even the “big stuff” is fixable.
Do you know what happens if you forget to file your income taxes one year (look, I was still drinking pretty heavily, I forgot a lot of things that year)?
Literally nothing, the IRS has a little section on their site that reads “did you forget to file? Just file within 3 years to avoid any fines.”
People mess up. We make mistakes. There is almost always a mechanism to fix them.
It’s going to be ok.
