When You're Ready to Grow Up and Take Responsibility for Yourself

Being a child is all about fitting in. To survive, you have to assimilate into the culture in which you were born. You have to learn the language and the social rules, meet the expectations, and jump through the hoops.

It's just survival. It's not moral. No one can help the culture they're born into. You can't survive without it.

Adolescence is about breaking out. You start learning which rules are breakable. You push the expectations and boundaries. You look outside of your given world and see what else is out there. You blow up the connections to see which ones can handle the stress. It's shedding your original prescription.

Again, it's not moral. It's developmental. Teenagers aren't "bad," they're just learning (sometimes the hard way).

Take Responsibility

Being an adult is about taking responsibility. It's looking at everything you were given and all the available opportunities and deciding what you want to do with your one beautiful life. It's moving from the victimhood that is childhood to the heroism of your own story.

It is moral. Owning your life is the right thing for adults to do.

Adulthood means deciding that whatever cards you were dealt, even if they were insufficient, are not going to hold you back from being your best self. It's playing your hand, whatever it is, and never saying die. Each day is a new opportunity. As an adult, you have a million resources—including yourself. You're smart. You're strong. You can humbly ask for help.

Only adults come to counseling and actually do the work it takes to level up. Only adults face their fears and shame. Only adults admit when they are wrong or weak or limited. Only adults take full responsibility for themselves.