A Children’s Guide to Adulting

Some Myths About Being a Grown-up and What I Know Now

Dear current children of the world. Dear former children. Dear theoretical future progeny of my own and others. And of course, last and most certainly least, dear adults reading this:

As a child, I simply could not wait to be an adult. For context, I was mostly raised in a small, dusty and repressively hot town in central Zimbabwe — a true backwater if you ever saw one. We had one traffic light in the entire town (I’m proud to report that in recent years this has increased to a staggering total of two), no places of entertainment and being the rather introverted and secluded child that I was, I had very little in the way of friends.

What I did have though, was lots of books and VCR tapes and I built up a whole lot of perceptions on what it would be like to grow up and effectively join the “real world”. These expectations only grew as I became a teenager and my talent as an athlete took me to some very weird and wonderful places far from home.

Then it happened. I reached what we would call in legal terms “the age of majority” and a year later at 19, I moved to a different country for university and all of sudden this small-town boy was staring into the glare of big city lights. The autonomy, the fun times, the travel, the…