Nathan Rabin Vs. Adulthood
My mother didn’t make ANY of these mistakes, on account of she abandoned me as a baby.
I go through life afraid and ashamed. Guilt is my constant unwanted companion. It’s always there to tell me that I’m not enough, that I’ll never be enough, and that I should be filled with shame every waking moment of my life.
One of the things I feel guilty about is my inability to cross the threshold separating childhood from adulthood. I just turned forty-eight. My wife and I own a townhouse, although it would be more accurate to say that my wife owns a townhouse she graciously allows me to live in.
I have two children. I own many failing small businesses involving pop culture media, books, and podcasting. I’m on the verge of finishing my ninth book. I have dentures.
I have many of the elements of adult life, but I cannot shake the feeling that I managed to get old, sad, and exhausted, existentially and otherwise, without ever actually becoming a grown-up.
There are many reasons for that. In many ways, I live the way that I did when I was a college student in the 1990s. I have the wardrobe of someone in their late teens. I wear jeans, shorts, and tee shirts with the names and logos of podcasts, consumer products, and the United States postal service.
I don’t like to brag, but I have a lot of tee shirts promoting the postal service. Why? I don’t know. I wear hoodies regardless of the weather. In the last few months, I’ve really splurged and bought a lot of socks from Fright-Rags: Ghostbusters socks, Halloween socks, Silence of the Lambs socks, and Army of the Dead socks.
Purchasing those socks is one of the best investments I’ve made in the past decade. Those socks are sturdy as hell. I’ve been wearing them exclusively for months, and there is not a single hole in any of them.
Where other people my age carry around briefcases like proper adults, I never stopped taking a backpack with me everywhere. For a long time, I had my wife’s Brown backpack, but I recently traded that in for a brand-new Comedy Bang Bang backpack from Podswag.
I don’t just dress the way I did twenty-five years ago. I do pretty much the same thing professionally, as well. A quarter century ago, I made a living writing amusingly about terrible entertainment.
I used to have a job, first at The A.V. Club and then at The Dissolve. That made me feel like an adult, as did having a 401K. Then, I was laid off from The Dissolve nine years ago, and I went from thinking that I’d always have a job in pop culture media to thinking that my days of employment had officially ended.
Writing You Don’t Know Me But You Don’t Like Me pushed me away from the dreary world of adult responsibility and into a crazy realm of eternal adolescence. I connected with Insane Clown Posse, its mythology, and its fanbase spiritually, emotionally, and culturally because I didn’t really have a childhood because my youth was full of trauma, rejection, and agonizing loneliness. So, I valued the opportunity to live out the happy childhood I never had alongside other revelers indulging their inner children.
I knew a former colleague was headed in very different directions because he got into opera, and I got into the Gathering of the Juggalos and Phish shows.
As a rule, responsible adults do not generally wear clown makeup, even if they are professional clowns.
The Autism and ADHD that I recently learned I have played a role in my stubborn refusal to grow up as well.
As an autistic man with ADHD, the world is overwhelming and intimidating much of the time, so I cling to the things that I love and know and that make me feel safe. And that is hoodies and Mountain Dew and podcasts and backpacks and writing about weird-ass shit that I feel passionately about, even if the world as a whole doesn’t seem to give a shit.
As with everything, it’s a lot easier if you have money. Living like a kid while approaching fifty can be seen as an endearing eccentricity if you have money. If you’re struggling mightily, however, it can feel like your whole lifestyle is a failure.
It’s like how rich people are eccentric, but poor people are crazy.
Getting diagnosed with the Triple Crown of neurological conditions (ADHD, Autism, and Bipolar) allowed me to have more compassion for myself. It’s allowed me to see that what I saw as limitations and character flaws are symptoms of conditions I’ve had all my life but have only started treating in the past few months.
I’d like to be able to at least act like a grown-up if and when the mood hits me. I’d love to be able to dress up nicely, like an adult, so that I could take my wife out for a nice dinner. I’d love to have the bank account of a responsible adult.
I’m no Peter Pan. I’m tired and world-weary, but I can also see that my unwillingness to leave childish things behind has served me well, particularly considering that I did not know why I did the things I did until recently. I should not be judgmental or self-critical because I was just doing what I felt I had to do to survive and feel safe in a world that has never stopped terrifying and confusing me for reasons I understand now better than ever before.
Did you enjoy this article? Then consider becoming a patron here
AND you can buy my books, signed, from me, at the site’s shop here