Is This Adulthood?

I used to think adulthood would feel like arriving somewhere—like I’d wake up one day calm, competent, and finally sure of myself. Instead, it feels more like moving through my days with a mental checklist and a practiced smile, doing what needs to be done and making jokes along the way so no one notices how tired I am. I’m good at this part. Too good, maybe.

But lately, I haven’t been showing up.

I quit a job I loved. A job that looked, from the outside, like proof that I was finally doing adulthood right. I started as a seasonal employee. Part-time. Within three months, I became a department supervisor. Then a key holder. Before my third year, I was promoted to assistant store manager in the highest-volume store in the district. My boss’s boss told me to stay. To hang in there. That in a year or two, I’d have my own store.

And still, I left.

It wasn’t an easy decision. I loved the work. But the culture was relentless, and being competent made me an easy target—especially for the store manager and the managers around me. The better I performed, the more exposed I felt. So I walked away from something I had built from the ground up.

Now I’m lost again.

I’m scared to admit that out loud, especially at this age. I’m turning fifty-four in a few days, and instead of feeling settled, I feel like I’m standing at the beginning of something without a map. I thought by now I’d know the ropes. That I’d have direction. That I wouldn’t still be asking myself what comes next.

I found love late in life. He’s close to retiring. I uprooted myself, moved to a foreign country, rebuilt from scratch, and took a job I knew nothing about—only to leave it once it finally started going well. And now I’m here, half a century in, trying to figure out what I’m supposed to do next.

Is this adulthood?

What’s unsettling isn’t just that I quit. It’s that I quit something I was good at. Something I built slowly and carefully, the way I was taught to do everything—show up, work hard, don’t complain, prove yourself twice over. I’ve spent most of my life believing that if I kept moving forward, if I stayed useful and capable, clarity would eventually follow. That effort would turn into direction.

But standing here now, without the structure of that job, I’m realizing how much of my confidence came from being needed—and how fragile it feels when that need disappears.

I don’t know how much of this is personal and how much of it was inherited. Growing up Filipino Chinese, there wasn’t much room for uncertainty. You did what needed to be done. You didn’t linger in confusion. You didn’t announce fear. You worked, you adjusted, you carried on—preferably with humor, preferably without burdening anyone else. I learned early that being capable was safer than being unsure, and that making things look easy was its own kind of survival.

I married too young. I became a mother too soon. I survived domestic violence. I raised five children on my own. I worked jobs and built small businesses I knew nothing about, not because I was fearless, but because fear was familiar. Fear of not providing. Fear of failing the five innocent souls who depended on me. So I kept moving.

Whenever I was promoted, whenever life began to resemble stability, something would shift. The culture would sour. The pressure would sharpen. The attacks would start. I don’t know where that cycle began, only that I learned how to endure it. And when endurance stopped working, I learned how to leave.

That pattern served me when survival was the goal.

Now my children are grown. All of them successful in their own right, with lives and families of their own. I don’t know how we survived those years, but we did. And for the first time in my life, the fear that once propelled me forward has nowhere obvious to land.

I am not religious, but I have always had faith. Not the loud kind. Not the kind that needs a label. Just a quiet belief that something larger was holding us together when I couldn’t. I once read a passage about the birds of the air—how they do not store away what comes next, yet they are fed. I never memorized the words. I didn’t need to. The message stayed with me through years I don’t like to revisit.

That faith carried me through moments when survival felt impossible. It carried me even when I left a job that was slowly unraveling my mental health. But now, standing here again, without a clear next step, the fear feels different. Quieter. Heavier. Less urgent—but more unsettling.

It isn’t that we can’t eat. It’s that I’ve always been the one who earned. Provided. Held things together. And without that role, I find myself wondering who I am when I’m not in motion. When I’m not fixing, enduring, or proving.

Is this all I am now?

Or is this what happens when the cycle that kept you alive no longer fits the life you’ve built?

I spent most of my life believing that movement was the same as direction. That survival was proof I was doing it right. I thought adulthood meant knowing—knowing the ropes, the answers, the next step.

But maybe adulthood isn’t about arriving at certainty at all.

Maybe it’s about standing still long enough to admit that you don’t know—and trusting, for the first time, that not knowing doesn’t mean you’re failing.

Maybe it means letting go of the version of yourself that survived…
and making room for the one who gets to live.