Adulthood, Independence, and Ceremony

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[Kasmira]

This comment:

My piercings were all to assert that I was a separate adult entity and not under my parents rule (which may seem juvenile but it was extremely important to me).

by tinapo85 over in the Kink and Spirituality Thread got me thinking about adulthood and independence and how we mark them (whether physically [piercings, tattoos, etc.], or otherwise).

As tinapo noted, the decision to physically mark independence can seem "juvenile" and when done for the wrong reasons I suppose it is. However, the change from dependent to independent seems to me to be one of the big milestones in life. For those on paths that emphasis marking life's milestones, it seems like this would be a pretty major one to consider. Not to mention several historical pagan religions have precedents for adulthood ceremonies that would be relevant to recons and eclectics.

So my question for TC folks who are either approaching this point or have passed it (recently or otherwise) is how did/will you mark this passage? If you didn't/won't, why not? Does this fit under the title of spiritual practice or is it unrelated to your spiritual path?

[Kasmira]

To answer my own question:

I'm currently at the "in-progress" phase of gaining independence. I have marked the phases of that process with several "ceremonies" both spiritual and more mundane.

I got my tattoo the year I left home (I was 16) and, though it was not the main reason for getting it, that new degree of independence is certainly somewhat represented by that ink.

The piercings I got on my 18th birthday (two more helix ear rings) were much more deliberately markings of my newfound legal independence (the simple fact my dad didn't have to come in with me to get them). In the end it was very anticlimactic. They didn't even look at my ID! Still, I like my holes and all they represent. I've been free to do what I like in practice for a long time (I'm the fourth of four kids, anything goes as far as my parents are concerned - if my brothers managed to survive then I'm going to do just fine...) but it is an important step to not have to have them sign off on everything.

This year I started renting my own apartment. I still get help with the rent from my folks, but I'm the one on the lease. To mark this I took Dad out for dinner when he came to visit. It sounds silly and mundane, but to be able to surprise him by picking up the check and fobbing off his attempts to cover it as usual was actually really nice and kind of a mini-milestone in itself.

In a little over 12 months I will graduate and transition pretty much overnight to 100% financial independence (another side effect of being a fourth child, my folks draw the financial help line at your first degree and draw it pretty firmly). I'm an odd mixture of excited, petrified, and plain old sick of depending on someone else's money. This will definitely involve some sort of ceremony both on the mundane level -probably paying my first rent check with money I've earned myself (hey, it's a ceremony if you make it one...)- and more spiritual -probably more ink, though ink, for me, has to represent something I've done not just had happen to me so it will probably be incorporated into a piece about my time living here in Egypt and the lessons thereof. Otherwise it will probably be a piercing which is what I generally use to mark things that happen to me.

In some ways, the mundane ceremonies (first time paying for dinner, first fully independent rent payment) are more important to me than the spiritual ceremonies that mark them physically. Differentiating between them as mundane and spiritual is also a bit of a misnomer. They are both spiritual, the former is simply more of an everyday aspect of spirituality and the latter more of the, uh, ceremonial aspect. I suppose this also raises the question of what is a ceremony, but I stand by my earlier comment that it is what you make it and that's really a topic for another thread anyway.

[Hyacinth Belle]

So my question for TC folks who are either approaching this point or have passed it (recently or otherwise) is how did/will you mark this passage? If you didn't/won't, why not? Does this fit under the title of spiritual practice or is it unrelated to your spiritual path?

I didn't do a spiritual ceremony, but I like this thread and will answer from the mundane side on things I saw as milestones for me. I still live at home, but the catch is I pay for ALL my school, car, clothes, entertainment, etc. I'm not as independent as I'd like in that I wish I could live on my own, but with my mom not willing to help me with cold hard cash I can't quite afford to move out.

For one, I remember the first solo drive I took when I got my driver's license. haha. I went to the mall by myself for no reason, and it was a very deliberate "Ok, Mom. I'm leaving now." thing and we both sighed and gave a meek little smile at each other.

I also bought a car recently. It's the second car I've bought, but the first was a cheap old thing to go from A to B, and I didn't have a huge hand in picking it out. This past summer I bought a for real car. A 2006 Mazda 3. *squee!* I love it, and it was the first real loan I got. And I didn't need a co-signer for it. I kind of like making my $191.66 payment each month. I love my car and I love that I worked for it, searched for it, test drove it, and it's all mine. I look like a real person in it, not just a college student. lol. And I sold my old car on my own, which was really satisfying.

And oddly enough, when I was ten or so I remember the first time I realized I was tall enough to reach the top of the refrigerator! I also remember the first time, when I was a year or two older, when my trainer let me go ride by myself. She told me to go on up to the arena and ride, and she'd be up then. She never came though. I was sooo nervous. haha. My trusty horse Bandit must have wondered what was wrong with me! These last two don't really go with "adulthood," but definitely with independence.

[Monica M.]

So my question for TC folks who are either approaching this point or have passed it (recently or otherwise) is how did/will you mark this passage? If you didn't/won't, why not? Does this fit under the title of spiritual practice or is it unrelated to your spiritual path?

I guess I obtained independence more or less at 15. The passage for me involved leaving school, working fulltime, aquiring a 3 year old, changing religions and shagging anything that moved. To mark it I got my nipple pierced but that was more a silent expression of who I was then a formal rite of passage. I must say I don't think I handled any of it particularly well but it was a definate change from child to adult. Having said that when I go back to stay with my parents now my Mum still treats me like one of the kids, she even gives me money every time we go out despite the fact that I don't need it and still feel responsible for the kids. A side effect of being single and childless I think.

When I moved out of home (nearly 21) I marked it by moving interstate. I think it was too hard for me to be able to get out of home and be completly independent with all my family nearby. It was fairly extreme but it certainly make the transition clear.

[yewberry]

So my question for TC folks who are either approaching this point or have passed it (recently or otherwise) is how did/will you mark this passage? If you didn't/won't, why not? Does this fit under the title of spiritual practice or is it unrelated to your spiritual path?

I was pregnant through my 20th year and gave birth a couple weeks past my 21st birthday.  While I TOTALLY DO NOT RECOMMEND THIS FOR ANYONE ELSE, it made for a very clear delineation between childhood and adulthood for me.

No help at all, huh? 

Brina

[Star]

I was pregnant through my 20th year and gave birth a couple weeks past my 21st birthday.  While I TOTALLY DO NOT RECOMMEND THIS FOR ANYONE ELSE, it made for a very clear delineation between childhood and adulthood for me.

On a similar note, I lived with my parents until I got married, which was when I was 20 and just at the end of college (I went to a 2-year tech school).  So that was a pretty clear delineation for me, too.  I never did any formal coming-of-age thing, it just kind of happened.

I think the church I went to when I was growing up considered Confirmation a coming-of-age rite.  Allegedly after that we were adults in the eyes of the church and etc. etc. whatever.  But this happened around the end of eighth grade (13-ish years old), and although it was certainly a rite of passage I never really felt it as a coming-of-age thing.  I felt like we were all too young for it to be that quite yet.  High school graduation maybe.  College graduation for some people; by the time I got to it, myself, it felt anticlimactic and just...  blah.

[Finn]

High school graduation maybe.  College graduation for some people; by the time I got to it, myself, it felt anticlimactic and just...  blah.

Same here, though I saw it as an unfortunate effect of the public education system working it's anticlimatic blahness on the whole concept of being a "young adult."


To answer the original question, I thought that going to college in another state would be my rite of passage. In a way, it was, but not into becoming an independent adult. It was a rite of passage into becoming more fully self-aware. Which, I guess you can argue is what being an adult is all about.

I'm currently living with my parents again, after graduating college, and I still don't feel like an adult. I do my own taxes, bought my own car, but I'm still on my parents' health insurance, still eat their groceries, and owe them money for that car. *shrug*

However, I am going on an adventure soon, which is quickly becoming a great opportunity to mark another rite of passage: perhaps not into full "adulthood", whatever that means, but into my self-directed life. Which, again, you can argue what being an adult is all about.  

I think my family will want me to feel like an "adult", and expect me to be an adult, in the cultural sense of the word, when I have my own health insurance, and pay my own rent. Or if I get married.

But frankly, none of these marks of adulthood are really that meaningful to me, because "adulthood" in the cultural sense of the word is not meaningful to me at all. Being able to pay for my own needs is important, yes, but the trappings of responsibility and all the baggage of expectations and obligations of being an adult are pretty distasteful to me, for the most part, in that they are thrust onto you without your consent. I don't think that really warrants the shift in consciousness that I think a rite requires.

I'd like to feel more like a "fully-actualized me" than an adult, and so far, my own feelings of rites have been toward that end instead. When I am an adult, I hope it will be on my own terms, and not on everyone else's.

/strangely rebellious feelings  

[alleyesonazarath]

So my question for TC folks who are either approaching this point or have passed it (recently or otherwise) is how did/will you mark this passage? If you didn't/won't, why not? Does this fit under the title of spiritual practice or is it unrelated to your spiritual path?

This is a good discussion, thank you for starting it Kasmira! 

For me, it had gone on for about a decade now. I'm 23, but I started breaking away when I was in junior high school. It began with small things, like washing my own clothes. Over the following couple of years, I started using my allowance money to buy my own clothing and meals. When I got my first car at the age of 18 (a van that had a leak in the steering fluid compartment... fun times!), I would drive my friends around everywhere.

As I got into college, I began to start gaining self respect and worth, and I tried harder in classes. Over time, a professor (now my friend and mentor) took me down to the school newspaper, and helped me get a gig as a staff reporter. I forced myself to break through my extremely shy self to interview people, and found I had a knack for getting quotes. A year later, I became the editor of the paper, which was a great responsibility, and departure from the person I was when I first decided to develop on my lonesome and do my own laundry as a teen.   

Each year has been a gradual progression, and now I live on my own, and function well enough with a part time job and school, where I'm getting honors level grades. Don't get me wrong, I couldn't do this without financial help from my grandpa, but I help him with job work and other stuff, so I'm not "dependent" upon him.

Growing up, I had always had low self esteem, and bad living environment as well as parents and step parent (beyond what society defines as abusive). I try being more merciful when talking about them, but it really is hard. What really gets me depressed about the whole thing these days, is I'd like to start a family of my own someday, but I've never had a working relationship model to model myself of. The whole thing is a foreign world to me, since I've always functioned best alone. The danger is if I'm not careful, I'll wind up no better of a person than they are, and of course that impacts any and all desires I have when pursuing relationships. Needless to say, I don't get many dates!   

Stepping out on ones own is a necessary thing in order for one to live. It's not easy, and there will always be struggles. But to those reading that are thinking about it, I highly recommend doing so. You'll be better because of it.   

[Aster Breo]

On a similar note, I lived with my parents until I got married, which was when I was 20 and just at the end of college (I went to a 2-year tech school).  So that was a pretty clear delineation for me, too.  I never did any formal coming-of-age thing, it just kind of happened.

Ditto, except I hadn't finished college.  I dropped out to get married at age 20.  (Which I definitely DO NOT recommend.  It worked out for us, but we were extraordinarily lucky.)  A few months later, my husband and I moved to Boston.  So I went from totally dependent on my parents to married and living 500 miles away in a very short period of time. 

I guess the wedding was my rite of passage between childhood and adulthood.  It didn't feel like that at the time, though.  I think my rite of passage was really when I had my first child, or, rather, when I survived having my first child.  It was a very difficult birth -- a c-section, eventually -- with many complications, including post-delivery mega-infections and hospitalizations.  Two months later, we moved back into my parents home, where we still live.  (My family has a long tradition of multi-generation households, so it had always been the plan for us to move back in with my family so I could take care of my grandmother who died a few years later from Alzheimers.)

Looking back from a perspective of 25 years later, I think a rite of passage is a great thing and I would strongly encourage it for most people.  I kinda wish I'd done things differently, myself.  (Which is not to say I'm not happy with the way things turned out.  As I said, we were extraordinarily lucky.  )

FWIW...

[Dark Midnight]

So my question for TC folks who are either approaching this point or have passed it (recently or otherwise) is how did/will you mark this passage? If you didn't/won't, why not? Does this fit under the title of spiritual practice or is it unrelated to your spiritual path?

I was totally stupid. I ran away from home at 17 and got engaged to a guy I adored who turned out to be a complete asshole! I caught him with one of my 'friends' and ended up giving him a concussion whilst her sister (an actual friend) dealt with her. Admittedly, the other girl was my age and he was older (21) and a real charmer. I went back home to my parents when I was 18, but of course all the rules had changed. I wasn't going to follow the old 'do as you are told' rules any more. I got a job, paid my own way completely and essentially did what I wanted to. I met Noel when I was 19, we were friends for ages before we got together, and I got married in 1998. I was 23 then and we are still together now with an 8 year old daughter.

It had nothing to do with spirituality, and more to do with being an idiot, but I see it as 'live and learn' with major emphasis on the learn part!

[darashand]

So my question for TC folks who are either approaching this point or have passed it (recently or otherwise) is how did/will you mark this passage? If you didn't/won't, why not? Does this fit under the title of spiritual practice or is it unrelated to your spiritual path?

I'm 24 almost 25 and I am finally feeling like an adult.  Right now I feel like I'm going through the initiation process--f'ex living on my own and paying my own bills, being able to provide for myself whatever I need.  It's rough.  I can't say I feel like a kid anymore.  I still make immature decisions, but I'm not perfect and it's relatively reasonable for me to do so.  It's not like I'm 40 and making very immature decisions regularly.  I think it's necessary for young people to have some time of initiation.  I think it really helps with the process, to say "Hey! It's adult-time!" instead of just being thrown into it without much of anything.  I think it makes people feel lost without these types of ceremonies--we instinctively seek out these things, create our own little rituals, because we need them.  On the other end of the spectrum, my mother just became a "Crone" (in terms of Wicca, an example as I am not Wiccan) and did so without any sort of mention, like it was just something that happened.  It was kinda sad, because she is considered to be a Wise Woman and could have taken her place with other Wise Women, but eh, it just happened.  Nothing special to make her feel honored. 

So, yes...in my own tradition, it is important for these things.  I am not really sure about how the Irish viewed it, but that is something I will have to do more research on, but for my spiritual path, it is an essential part of development.

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