Metamorphosis: challenging our binary approach to adulthood

As an existential therapist working with adults of all ages, I often see the challenges that can come with the transition into adulthood. I wrote a short poem recently as a personal response to aspects of my work with these ‘beginner adults’.

The challenge of early adulthood

Most of my twenty-something clients are struggling to manage the transition from the low-autonomy, low-responsibility world of childhood to the high-autonomy, high-responsibility world of adulthood effectively.

In particular, many are burdened by a perceived societal or parental expectation that they should arrive at the start of adulthood fully formed and able to cope with all the complex new tasks that confront them.

This can include:

• examining and reframing their relationship with their parents or other caregivers;
• allowing their congruent identity to emerge and flourish;
• finding somewhere to live, earning a living and managing money;
• forming intimate relationships based on respect for self and other;
• learning to use their new agency in ways that serve them well;
• sustaining a healthy balance between autonomy and responsibility.

When, inevitably, they stumble (for this is difficult stuff that needs lots of practice) but see others apparently taking it in their stride, they start to worry that they are beginning to fall irrevocably behind in some undeclared race of life.

Before long, this existential uncertainty can lead to the obvious but mistaken conclusion that something must be wrong with them. That perhaps they are already failures, destined to fall short of the expectations others place on them. Attempting to soothe this anxiety, some young people can be vulnerable to behaviours and beliefs which promise freedom but turn out to be a trap.

These might include:

• procrastination
• drugs and alcohol
• self-harm
• disordered eating
• material consumption
• trying to find themselves in the lives of others.

An alternative perspective 

As an existential therapist working with young adults, I offer them an alternative perspective on the nature of existence. An alternative to the curious concept that becoming an adult is a binary switch flipped overnight at the age of 18.

I invite them to consider that:

• All of us live and die as a work in progress.
• Life is not a race with winners and losers but a unique, time-limited opportunity to try to exist on our own terms, whatever these may be.
• There are no ‘shoulds’ or ‘should nots’ in the universe, and conventional definitions of what it is to be successful in our society are no more real or valid than any other ways of being.

I often cite the wisdom of early existential psychotherapist Karl Jaspers, who wrote, "We are not what we are simply once and for all, but a process." Together with Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s observation that "to live is to be slowly born," when framed this way, our journey through adulthood can be understood as a lifelong process of becoming. And that ultimately, "life is an attempt, not an achievement."

My work with young adults gave rise to my poem Metamorphosis, in which I seek to capture the idea that adulthood is not something bestowed upon us automatically when we reach some arbitrary age. We are indeed a process and, for most of us, if we trust ourselves to metamorphose authentically, the best is yet to come.