The older I get, the younger I feel. For many intents and purposes, I am a fully-functioning adult. I can drive, I can vote, I go to school every day, I buy my own groceries, I do my own laundry, cook my own dinner. I have gotten to the point in life where it is my own responsibility to keep myself alive.

Yet the more independent I become, the more often I feel myself looking for my parents. I went home for the second half of spring break last week, and it was so refreshing to just be a kid again for a few days. I didn’t have to sustain myself, I got to take a break from thinking like an adult for a brief period of time. I needed it.

I was talking with my mom and my aunt about my impending future over dessert, as families do. And it really got me thinking. For the rest of my life, I will be responsible for myself. Someday if I have kids, I’ll be responsible for them as well. Sure, I still have my parents and aunts, uncles, and grandparents. But it’s different.

And it’s weird.

On the day-to-day, I don’t feel like an adult. There’s no switch that was flipped to suddenly make me feel responsible and capable. I just have to keep going. Every day working to be a little better than the day before. Every day walking a little further away from relying on my parents.

And I’ll always need my parents! I’m not saying that I won’t. But the reality is that I don’t live in the same house as them anymore. I might never again.

The less society tells me I should be needing them, the more I find myself reaching out for my parents. In high school I took it for granted in some ways. Now that I’m in college, a day doesn’t go by that I haven’t texted someone in my old household something irrelevant.

It’s comforting! I know that, even though I know that my parents don’t know everything, they know a lot. For someone who makes at least one mistake a day, it’s so sweet to get to talk to people who have been through it before.