I didn’t mean for this blog to only be a “how to”/ “self-help” site. Rather, I wanted to track my adulthood experiences, make jokes out of them, and hopefully help circulate empathy between readers and myself.

So, here are a few recent tales from adulthood:

For starters, I spent all of last week petrified, convinced that I was going to lose my job somehow. Why? Absolutely no reason at all, other than the fact that the fragility of maintaining a balanced livelihood is still sinking in. (And note, this symptom of nervous young-adulthood is of no way reflective of my actual job, because both my job and my coworkers are pretty freakin’ awesome, which makes it all the more irrational.)

But, I’m pretty sure every young adult is constantly in a state of severe anxiety for the first year or so of adulthood because they’re just beginning to realize that literally everything is constantly up in the air; everything could change in a second.

Everything is up in the air and, unlike the parabolic motion you learned about in your high school physics class, you have absolutely no idea how it’s going to come down. Sometimes it falls into your tiny, barely-adult hands and sometimes it crashes onto the floor and splatters everywhere…like on the floor, on the walls, on your pants…everywhere. You just have to clean it up and keep going, I guess.

And, speaking of cleaning things up: taxes are a killer. I filed them last week (yay) but was only maybe 60% sure that I did it correctly (not yay). I’m trusting that either TaxAct (or a police force sent by the IRS) would’ve warned me if I were completely off, but who knows, right? I imagine that my sureness about taxes will get better year by year, but it’ll probably cap at about 80% one day because there were just way too many different options and qualifiers for me to ever be 100% confident.

In the same way that I tiptoed my way through filing my taxes, I also spent about ten minutes standing completely still in my kitchen one night trying to figure out what the explicable noise was coming from my trashcan/refrigerator area. I like to keep things clean because I’m both terrified and disgusted of bugs/rodents/the like, but almost anything can happen when you’re living in a building that was constructed in the 1920s. I wouldn’t call my apartment complex “pristine,” but I traded that label out for the hip vintage aspect of it in confidence that I, myself, am clean enough to keep all the critters away.

Still, I saw a mouse scamper across the sidewalk on my way to the gym here once and I’ve heard enough horror stories of giant bugs in kitchens that my heart drops at the weird noises that old buildings and appliances can make. So, I spent ten extra minutes of my life listening as hard as I could, heart-thumping, at what I thought was a mouse in my trashcan. Turns out it was my fridge being weird…I think. Typical.

Replace “typical” with “blessed” and fast forward to my weekend, where I took a shot of tequila in Mexico with my coworkers. That’s really adult, right?! Seriously—I don’t know what’s more significant of adulthood: taking an awesome trip to Mexico with your coworkers (and in turn remembering that you don’t always have to hang on to that young-adult, job-related anxiety that I talked about earlier), or actually managing to drink tequila without throwing up (or even getting remotely schwasty). I’m proud of myself.

Adulthood is tough, but it’s worth it to keep trying the best way you see fit. I still don’t remember the last time I went to a grocery store. I tried to make mashed potatoes the other day—they were pretty good but I only had butter (no milk) so they were still a bit dry. I’ll get there.

I still end up wasting an hour or so sprawled across my small, studio-apartment floor every few days, allowing myself to give up for at least a little bit of time. But, otherwise, if you were to ask me “how’s it going?” I’d say something like, “It’s going.”