Why don't I feel like a proper grown-up?

Some years ago, I was sitting in a university committee meeting as the philosophy department's representative. While someone talked through a large collection of spreadsheets, I was fiddling with an elastic band under the table. Unfortunately, the elastic band escaped.

It shot across the room, ricocheted off the ceiling, and landed with great force on the speaker's clipboard. Everyone looked around in surprise. I immediately turned and frowned accusingly at the kindly, white-bearded eminent historian beside me.

I was an academic. I had a PhD. I was representing my department on an official committee. Yet my immediate response was to blame the grown-up next to me.

The mysterious species of proper grown-ups

Have you ever looked around a room full of apparently competent adults and wondered how on earth you managed to sneak in?

Perhaps you have a career, a mortgage, children, or people depending on you. You make decisions, solve problems, and pay bills, but sometimes you want a real adult to take the reins, before remembering, with alarm, that apparently that's you.

Or perhaps you've reached middle or old age without a conventional career, marriage, children, or a home you own. None of these things is a qualification for adulthood, but society's expectations can make it feel as though everyone else has moved on while you're waiting for life to begin.

For years, I imagined proper grown-ups as almost another species. They wore beautifully coordinated pastel clothes that flattered them perfectly. They did something that made their eyebrows look impeccable that I couldn’t quite work out. They smelled faintly of subtly balanced perfume, or possibly just of competence. They never spilt tomato ketchup down themselves.

It wasn't really about their appearance. I imagined that beingone of them must feel completely different from being me: they inhabited a settled state of grown-up-ness I'd somehow failed to acquire.

These days I'm more comfortable in my own slightly wonky, frequently dishevelled adulthood. Occasionally the old feeling returns, even though I know those other people have uncertainties and stained clothes of their own. Knowing something intellectually isn't always the same as feeling it.

The grown-ups are always somebody else

Recently, I was reviewing some counselling notes and read that a client was 'seeking help' with a difficulty. I thought how sensible this was, and hoped they'd found someone able to help. Then I remembered that they were seeking help from me. I wasn't doubting my ability to do the work. I'd simply pictured the competent professional as somebody else.

This is slightly different from the usual idea of impostor syndrome: fearing we're less capable than other people think. We might know we're competent and still feel we don't belong to the same category as other adults.

We see other people's confidence, authority, and immaculate eyebrows from the outside, but experience ourselves from the inside, with all our doubts, contradictions, and irrational impulses. We know what it feels like to be ourselves; we can only imagine what it feels like to be them. And so we invent an entire inner world to match the eyebrows.

Is adulthood a role we're all performing?

The philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre described a café waiter whose movements are a little too precisely waiter-like. He's playing at being a waiter. Sartre's concern wasn't simply that he was performing a social role, but that we can mistake a role for our whole selves.

Perhaps adulthood works similarly. We learn how to behave in meetings, at the school gates, and on the phone to energy suppliers. We adopt the apparent certainty that each situation demands. Others may take that performance as evidence of an inner quality we ourselves can't feel.

But others are performing roles too. That doesn't make adulthood fake, any more than it makes the waiter not really a waiter. But perhaps there's no mysterious essence of grown-up-ness behind the performance.

Why might neurodivergent people recognise this feeling?

This experience has frequently been reported by my neurodivergent clients, although it is far from being exclusive to them.

Some neurodivergent folk have uneven profiles of ability, sometimes called a spiky profile. I was an academically talented child, but already at secondary school before I could properly tie my shoelaces or read an analogue clock. I'm still not particularly good at either. Being capable in one area doesn't make supposedly basic things easy in another.

An adult might excel at demanding work yet struggle with laundry, meals, or remembering to empty the bins. When these things are seen as tests of maturity, difficulty with them can feel like evidence of being a failed grown-up.

For some autistic people, masking or camouflaging means consciously adapting their behaviour to meet social expectations. A 2023 systematic review identified pressures to conform, concerns about acceptance, and effects on identity and wellbeing. This isn't Sartrean 'bad faith': masking may be necessary in unwelcoming or unsafe environments, and can carry real costs.

But others can learn from autistic experience. Having to study social rules consciously can reveal that they're conventions, not natural laws. The effortless performance of adulthood is partly something society has taught us all. Research with young autistic people has also challenged conventional milestones as universal measures of adulthood. There isn't one correct way to grow up.

When it's more than a funny feeling

For some, feeling like a kid in an adult world is amusing. For others, it brings real shame: the conviction that everyone else has moved on while they've been left behind.

Growing up with repeated criticism or having your judgement dismissed may shape how you see yourself long after childhood. Trauma can also leave someone feeling 'stuck' at an earlier age or life stage.

This doesn't mean development has literally stopped. A capable adult might experience an encounter with an authority figure through the fear or helplessness of a younger self, suddenly feeling small and powerless despite knowing they're no longer a child.

Finding the person behind the grown-up

When I was in personal therapy during counselling training, I initially found it difficult to relate to my therapist. Then one day she forgot the box of tissues. She rummaged in her bag and handed me a rather tatty pocket pack. One tissue had a big blue ink stain on the corner.

Something shifted. Here was this professional person producing exactly the sort of battered object that might emerge from my own bag. Suddenly she seemed more like someone I could recognise.

We can place other adults on pedestals without realising it. An ink-stained tissue might be enough to bring someone back down to earth. At other times, particularly when shame or trauma is involved, that distance is harder to bridge.

Counselling can offer space to ask where our picture of a 'proper grown-up' came from, whose standards we're trying to meet, and whether those standards ever made sense. We might recognise old internalised criticisms that still feel true, or expectations that were never realistic.

Once we overcome these barriers, we might learn that becoming comfortable with adulthood doesn't have to mean being free from uncertainty, imperfection, playfulness, or the occasional act of utter silliness.