The Truth behind the saying adulting is hard

Being an adult would be easy if life were black and white. 
Because yes "adulting is hard" but it's not hard because you have to iron your own clothes or pay the bills. 
It's hard because you have to try to find authenticity and truth in a world full of myth. 

Once upon a time life was black and white. 

Police officers were your friend, doctors made sick people better, school was necessary and the payoff was a "good job", porn was just pictures of naked women, Captain Cook discovered Australia, little boys teased girls they liked because that was how they showed their love, Soliders were heroes, smacking and time outs were deserved and jails were where "bad guys" go for doing "bad things", slavery was bad - but over long long ago. Women and Black people had equal rights now, and everyone had equal opportunities to succeed in a Capitalist Democracy, plus Socialism is bad M'Kay. 

Then I grew up. 

And things were still pretty much the same for a long time. Some police officers were corrupt, Captain Cook was not all that and a bag of chips, there was more to history that we were being told, maybe the "War on Terror" was really about oil and finishing what Daddy started and not so much about "defeating the Axis of Evil". Sure capitalism had its problems, and maybe global warming might be a threat in the far off future, but for the most part my world views remained pretty intact. 

I wasn't really an adult yet. Sure I was 18, 21, even 25. But I wasn't an adult yet, and that definition has nothing to do with having moved out of home or being financially independent or being married or any of the things I was hung up on at the time. The things I saw as necessary signs of having grown up, of being an adult. 

The shift started in 2009. With one book. "The Butterfly Effect" by Danielle Miller. 

It's not a massively groundbreaking eye-opening earth shattering book. It's not like Patty reading "The Female Eunuch" in Love Child but it started a slow transition to where I am now. 

I can replay the transition in my mind, the steps taken from there to here. And where I am now? Well that feels like Draco in "Isolation" - "The worst thing was he couldn't distinguish her blood from his. It was all the same shade......and he had no idea what that meant" Completely mind fucked. 

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With every part of everything you've been brought up to believe slowly starting to crumble and break up, leaving you with no idea where to stand because anywhere you put your foot could disintegrate any moment. And every shift causes little landslides until all that's left is rubble and ruins and you have no idea who you are and what the world means. 

Only I don't have Hermione there to guide me to the truth. I don't even have a truth. I don't think anyone does. 

And that's the really scary and hard part about being an adult. 

Realising that no one has "the truth".

Because everyone has been taught to believe the same lies, and everyone else either still believes them, or is struggling just as much as you. Its like if instead of being in a safe house Draco, Theo, Blaise and the other "Enlightened" had been back in their old world with their Death Eater parents, surrounded by pure-blood purity ideology, with no idea that the other enlightened existed and no way to know who or what they could trust. 


Ok so I'm slightly better off than that. I have the internet, and no one's out to kill me or watching my every move, so I can seek out other "Enlightened". I can forge alliances and ask questions and dig for information without fearing for my life. But the sense of having your entire understanding of the world shattered. That's very much the same. 

And so, no wonder so many people walk around being mainstream ostriches, happily sticking their heads in the sand. Because the sand is that childhood sense that there is black and white that everything makes sense, and that there is nothing to question. 

Babies sleep in cots, and picking them up too much will spoil them. Vegans are weird hippies. Children should show adults respect. I was smacked and i'm fine. Refugees are queue jumping terrorists in disguise. Hospital is the safest place to have a baby. Feminism is no longer necessary. Going to uni gets you a job, unless you do an Arts degree, but the Liberal Arts are just useless and have no benefit to society anyway. Parents who don't vaccinate should be charged. Sugar is fine, fat is bad. 

It's so much easier to live in that world. 

The cognitive dissonance became unnoticeable long long ago, because it occurs on a mass level, because it's easier to just forget that a different truth ever existed.Because doublethink really exists. Even more so for those who are brought up religious. 

Like honestly - this week alone I have seen hundreds if not thousands of comments saying that any woman who doesn't get the DTAP vaccine during the third trimester of pregnancy is a fucking idiot and deserves to have her child get Whooping cough, yet only 4 years ago the official government stance was not got give DTAP in pregnancy, and there have been no new studies released to prove it is safe and it is classed as a category C drug therefore any usage in pregnancy is both Off-Label and at the patient's own risk. "Pregnancy Category C Animal reproduction studies have not been conducted with Tripedia vaccine. It is not known whether Tripedia vaccine can cause fetal harm when administered to a pregnant woman or can affect reproductive capacity. Tripedia vaccine is NOT indicated for women of child-bearing age." Most of the women commenting about how stupid it is to not get DTAP in pregnancy, would not have had it in pregnancy themselves. Double-Think. 

slightly sidetracked Rant over. 

It's easier to live in that world. Nothing you do is questioned and criticised by everyone from your family to the lady in the grocery line. Nobody tells you you need to get a life or that there are "serious problems in the world" whilst ignoring the parts they play in creating or sustaining those same problems. No one calls you a feminizi or a sanctimummy. You don't loose friends and alienate your family. Going to the shops or the pool or the park isn't something that makes you want to scream. You just buy that gender limiting onesie for your baby and give the mum who's screaming at her toddler and threatening them with violence or love withdrawal an approving nod. You don't even notice the number of children crying or with looks of despair on their tiny little faces, resigned to a life of being ignored, threatened and treated like property. You join mothers groups and say "each to their own" and mean it. You don't wonder where the hell you are ever going to find a man who is an intersectional anti-porn feminist and attachment parent. You just marry "the one" you happen to "fall" in love with and parent the way you were parented without questioning. You don't have to give up your job or completely restructure your life to homeschool your kids. You just send them to school to have their imagination and critical thinking surpassed so that they will continue to be double-thinking Proletariats like the rest of the damn population. And you continue to live your life with not even an inkling of that fact.

That's so much easier. 

Meanwhile i'll be here adulting. 
 
Which actually means working out how the hell to raise my child in an authentic manner, to see the reality of the Matrix around us without scaring the crap out of him and traumatising his little brain. Whilst everyone else assumes I'm some crackpot looney spouting conspiracy theories, and craps on about adult life being so hard because god forbid you have to pay bills and do your own laundry.