These are the questions that nag my brain whenever I find myself laughing at scatological humor.
Let’s start by making a list of what adultiness is not:
- going to school and getting a job
- passing tests, gaining admissions, accumulating credentials
- marriages, babies, home ownerships
- naps, grape nuts, oatmeal, prostate exams
The Point: Adultiness is not the same as doing things that adults do.
So then what is it? A feeling? Maybe does it mean feeling confident and secure in your independence and responsibilities or some such?
Mmm, probably not. In A Jane Austen Education, William Deresiewicz describes the lessons he learned about adultiness through reading Pride and Prejudice. Adultiness is absolutely not a feeling of confidence, he says. In fact, it’s pretty much the opposite.
If anything, self-confidence and self-esteem are the great enemies, because they make you forget that you’re still just a bundle of impulse and ignorance.
The problem of so many young people is that they have too great a belief in their own feelings. They achieved the relative autonomy of adolescence—learning to trust yourself—but now they have to take the next step, into the full autonomy of adulthood. They need to learn to doubt themselves.
“Life is a comedy for those who think,” said Horace Walpole, “and a tragedy for those who feel.” Everyone thinks, and everyone feels, but Jane Austen’s question was, which are you going to put first?
Being adult-y, he/Jane says, means putting thinking before feeling. That doesn’t mean giving up your feelings, but it means giving up your belief in your feelings, your conviction that they are always right.
This was not easy to swallow. We tend to believe that our emotions are reliable indicators of the way things are in the world. How many times have you heard someone say, “I have a good feeling about this”—a college application, a lottery ticket, a new relationship—only to discover that things don’t necessary work out just because we have a good feeling about them? Older relatives are particularly fond of these kinds of pronouncements. “I know you’ll do well.” “I can’t imagine they won’t hire you.” “I’m sure everything will work out fine.” Really? You’re sure? What makes you so sure? Just because you happen to like me?
It’s important to doubt ourselves – our feelings – because by default we tend to see ourselves as glorious, flawless protagonists of the world’s story. Growing up, he says, means coming to see yourself from the outside, as one very limited (stupid, smelly) creature.
The first part of being adult-y, then, means honestly acknowledging your flaws.
Errors are not accidents that could have been avoided; they are expressions of character. You don’t “fix” your mistakes, Austen was telling us, as if they somehow existed outside you, and you can’t prevent them from happening, either. You aren’t born perfect and only need to develop the self-confidence and self-esteem with which to express your wondrous perfection. You are born with a whole novel’s worth of errors ahead of you. You can’t save yourself from your mistakes, but maybe your mistakes can save you from yourself.
The next part is feeling ashamed, disgraced, and humiliated by them.
Shame, humiliation, disgrace: hard feelings to accept if you’ve been brought up to believe that you should never have to experience any pain.
Our egos, Austen was telling me, prevent us from owning up to our errors and flaws, and so our egos must be broken down—exactly what humiliation does, and why it makes us feel so worthless. “Humiliation,” after all, comes from “humility.” It humbles us, makes us properly humble. So just as Pride and Prejudice taught me that it’s okay to make mistakes, it also told me that it’s okay to feel bad about them. Austen understood that growing up hurts—that it has to hurt, because otherwise it won’t happen.
The final step of adultiness, after noticing your flaws and feeling them, is remembering them.
It takes courage to admit your mistakes, and even more courage to remember them. How tempting it is to rewrite our personal history in a more flattering way, and how familiar we all are with the person who experiences a moment of self-knowledge—after a breakup or a failure or a sin—only to go right back to being the same person they always were. For Austen, maturation means refusing to forget. Humiliation is a gift that keeps on giving.
If you do growing up right, it never stops. Not only weren’t you born perfect, you are never going to be perfect, either. Becoming an adult is not going to give you the right to become complacent.
This is kind of a downer, isn’t it? To view adulthood as perpetual humiliation? As a downplaying of your passions and feelings?
Not so, says Deresiewicz:
Learning this lesson was oddly liberating. Just because I thought that another person had done something to me, I was now forced to acknowledge, didn’t mean that I was right. I might be offended by something they had said, but maybe I’d misunderstood them. I might be mad because they were getting ugly with me, but maybe I had started it. Feelings are always about something, and that “something” is not itself a feeling. It’s an idea, a perception of a situation. And because ideas can be wrong, the emotions that are based on them can also be wrong. So now I had a way to let go of my feelings when they weren’t legitimate—when they weren’t correct. I could acknowledge my emotions, but I didn’t have to be controlled by them.
Personally, I really like this definition of adultiness, but I might be biased. It excuses my tendency to put thinking ahead of feeling, my proclivity toward humiliation and insecurity, and, perhaps best of all, it permits me to keep laughing at scatological humor.
