Tuesday, March 8, 2022

Adulting is hard

 Adulting is hard, and I am not doing even a miniscule of what others do! I mean where are the days of sleeping at any time, eating just about anything, and feeling no burden of what old age holds? When you are getting closer to 40, your brain gets to eat more junk than your stomach.

Just last night I ate two squares of dark chocolate after dinner and it messed up my sleep. For one, I would have loved to eat a whole bar of Mars. But I compromise, people! I had the good for health and the blood pressure dark chocolate without realizing it is high in caffeine which is an antidote for my beauty sleep after 4 pm. Yes, that’s how amazing my adult system has become. And that is just the beginning of my complaints!

I began drinking alcohol pretty late in life. I had a few glasses here and there, but my career really began after I got married at 26. Come 38, it stopped abruptly due to palpitations post a few shots of the good old tequila/gin tonic. I mean, who has even heard of that? With that my uncontrollable laughter and incessant singing and dancing halted as well. I try to act drunk, but let’s face it, I am so bad at faking that I can’t even complete a happy birthday tune without getting bored and judging my shrill voice.

Don’t get me started on the sky-rocketing stress levels. When I was in 10th standard, I had my math preliminary exam. I was awful at everything that involved a,b,cd,x,y san, cos and theta. My cousin sister woke up at 4 am on the day of my exam to help me learn and I got through with just enough mrks to save her face. That was the exact amount of stress level that I was capable of handling and I thought existed in this world.

However, counting backwards to fall asleep while waiting for my whole exome sequencing results is not what I signed up for! I knew it was hard to wake up and that’s what alarm clocks and talking to your pillow to wake you up was made for, but sleep meditation for getting you into slumber, ah, no one taught me that.

I can’t imagine what my fragile friends with multiple kids and high-power jobs go through. They can’t even poop without consciously adding 30 gm of fibre to their meals!

We were taught how to save money. Your grumpy aunt gives you a thousand bucks, you buy a few candies and save the rest. By the time I was 18, my blue purse with a panda family on the cover had ten thousand rupees which can easily translate to one lakh of today. We were never told that if that money stays in that purse, it rots and loses its sheen. When I see 16-year olds talking about crypto and Tesla stock now, I laugh at them. But they are smarter than us for sure because their money will increase with rising inflation.

Although they are adulting faster than us too. Someone please tell them to slow down because their future, like ours, is all about falling interest rates, bulls and bears, tums and ibuprofens, and counting your chocolates before you count numbers to fall asleep.