Navigating Adulthood: Lessons from My Journey

Adulthood has taught me that age alone does not create wisdom—life experiences, reflection, and our willingness to change do. My journey has included mistakes, heartbreak, relationships, loss, love, and moments of rediscovery. Each season has taught me something about myself and reminded me that it is never too late to reassess your life, change direction, and choose differently. We are always becoming.

Entering Adulthood Without a Roadmap

Becoming an adult did not automatically come with the lessons I needed to successfully navigate adulthood. Looking back, I realize that because I lacked knowledge and guidance about so many things, I spent much of my young adult life simply trying to figure things out as I went.

I was married at 19 years old, only one year after graduating from high school. At that age, not only was I trying to understand marriage, but I didn't truly understand what real and healthy love felt like or what it was supposed to look like. I had entered an adult relationship before I had the opportunity to discover who I was as a woman.

At 23, I had my first child. When I look back at that young woman today, I realize just how much I still didn't know about myself. It is difficult to teach a child some of life's most important lessons when you are still trying to learn those lessons yourself. I loved my child, but love and life experience are not the same thing. In many ways, I was learning how to be a mother while I was still learning how to be me.

I had never even gone to a nightclub until I was around 24 years old. When I finally had that experience, I enjoyed myself—and I wanted to experience more of that kind of fun. For the first time, I began realizing that there were parts of young adulthood I felt I had never experienced. The problem was that I was already married.

I found myself in an adult relationship without ever having really experienced other relationships with the opposite sex or having the maturity to fully understand what I wanted and needed from a relationship. Eventually, some of the choices I made led to adultery, and ultimately, divorce.

I don't share that part of my story to excuse the choices I made. Part of becoming a Leveled Woman has been learning to look honestly at my own decisions and take accountability for them. At the same time, accountability has also required me to understand the younger version of myself—the woman making those decisions, what she knew, what she didn't know, and what she was searching for at the time.

After my divorce, I became a single parent, essentially winging my way through life and learning as I went. There was no manual. I didn't have someone mentoring me through adulthood or helping me understand relationships, motherhood, emotional maturity, or even myself.

Because I lacked that guidance early in life, many of my greatest lessons came through experience. Some were beautiful. Some were painful. Some came from mistakes I wish I had not made. But each one eventually taught me something I needed to know.

I entered adulthood believing that being grown meant I should know what I was doing. Life eventually taught me that becoming an adult and understanding how to live as one are two very different things.

Building Meaningful Relationships

One of the biggest lessons adulthood has taught me is that having people in your life and having meaningful relationships are two very different things. I was raised in a home where my parents' relationship existed somewhere between loving and toxic—with a heavy emphasis on the toxic side. 

My parents argued more than they demonstrated love toward one another, and because that was the relationship I witnessed growing up, I never fully understood what a healthy relationship was supposed to look or feel like. Without realizing it, those early experiences influenced what I would later recognize—and sometimes failed to recognize—in my own relationships.

Growing up, I told myself that I would never tolerate the things I watched my mother accept from my father. Yet when I entered my first marriage, I found myself accepting almost everything from everyone around me. I was a people pleaser. I wanted to stay quiet, avoid conflict, and stay out of the way.

Eventually, however, I began to realize that there was an entire world I had not experienced, and I wanted to know what was beyond the life I had created for myself.

Instead of dealing with what was happening within my marriage in a healthy way, I began disregarding the marriage and the vows that came with it.

From my perspective at the time, being married didn't appear to stop him from moving freely through his life, so I convinced myself that it shouldn't stop me either. I began coming and going as I pleased.

Eventually, our choices caught up with both of us. We were both doing wrong, and that wrong ultimately contributed to a messy divorce rather than an amicable ending to our marriage.

Years later, I had to become willing to look beyond what happened in my marriage and examine the history surrounding it. I had to look at what I witnessed as a child, what I carried into adulthood, what I accepted from others, and also the choices I made myself.

One of the hardest lessons of growth has been understanding that we cannot continue allowing history to repeat itself and then wonder why our lives keep producing similar results. Cycles cannot be broken by repeating them, and they certainly cannot be broken by ignoring them.

Breaking a cycle requires us to first recognize that the cycle exists. Then comes the harder part: being honest enough to recognize the role we may have played in continuing it.

That doesn't mean taking responsibility for someone else's behavior. It means taking responsibility for our own choices so that we can finally choose differently.

I couldn't change the relationship I witnessed growing up. I couldn't go back and change the choices made in my first marriage. But I could decide that history did not have to keep repeating itself through me.

When Life Becomes the Teacher

Adultery was one of the first difficult adult lessons I learned. Looking back, I understand differently now what people meant when they told me I was too young to get married. It wasn't simply about my age. The bigger question was whether I was mentally and emotionally mature enough to understand what marriage actually required.

Marriage requires you to invest time in learning another adult—their needs, their emotions, their expectations, their weaknesses, and the ways the two of you must learn to grow together. But when you haven't fully discovered who you are yet, how prepared are you to understand another person deeply enough to build a healthy life together?

That doesn't excuse adultery or the choices I made. I was responsible for my decisions. 

But adulthood has taught me that accountability isn't only admitting that you were wrong. It is also having the courage to examine yourself deeply enough to understand why you made certain choices so that you don't continue making them.

My second major lesson came through becoming a parent.

When you have children, especially at a young age, you are suddenly expected to become something you may have no idea how to be—a good parent. There is this little person depending on you to teach them about life while you are still trying to understand life yourself.

There are so many things I wish I could go back and change. Losing Martin made some of those thoughts even more difficult because there are things you don't get the opportunity to go back and redo. Loss taught me that life does not always give us another chance to say something differently, do something differently, or love someone differently.

That's one of the hardest realities I have had to accept.

Life has a way of teaching you whether you are willing to be taught in the beginning or not. Sometimes the lesson comes gently. Other times, the lesson comes through consequences, heartbreak, loss, and experiences you never would have chosen for yourself.

Then there were friendships. Where do I even start?

I learned that a friend could injure your heart just as deeply as a family member can. I once believed that if I entered a friendship with good intentions, I could expect the same intentions in return. Life taught me that isn't always true.

You have to give yourself time to know people. Not just who they tell you they are, but who their actions consistently reveal them to be. Trust shouldn't automatically be given simply because someone has been given the title of friend.

Think about it this way: people sometimes marry believing they know the person standing beside them, only to wake up years later and realize there were parts of that person they never truly knew.

Why would friendship automatically be any different?

People reveal themselves over time. And one of adulthood's greatest lessons for me has been learning to pay attention—not only to what people say, but to what they consistently show me.

I don't believe the answer is to become suspicious of everyone or to stop allowing people into your life. The lesson is to stop allowing your desire to see the good in people to prevent you from seeing what is actually there.

And maybe that is one of the greatest lessons life has taught me.

Experience will teach you what guidance didn't. The question is whether you will recognize the lesson when it arrives.

Learning to Make Room for Myself

After years of what I now recognize as a form of self-abuse, I finally woke up from the cloudy space that had kept me from truly seeing myself. My self-abuse didn't always look like something obvious. Sometimes it looked like constantly putting myself last. It looked like saying yes when I wanted to say no, answering every call, responding to every request, and feeling as though I had to be available whenever someone needed something from me.

I had become so accustomed to being there for everyone else that I didn't realize how little room I had left for myself. Eventually, I learned to say no.

I learned to lie down and rest without feeling as though I should be doing something for somebody. I learned that I didn't have to answer every beck and call that came my way. I learned that if my phone rang and I didn't feel like talking, I didn't have to answer it. I could call back later—or not at all if the conversation wasn't necessary.

That may sound like something small, but for someone who had spent years feeling responsible for being available to everyone, it was freedom.

I also learned that I don't have to be the person who helps in every situation. Everything does not require my involvement, my opinion, my money, my time, my energy, or my solution.

I can remove myself from being the common denominator. For me, that meant recognizing how often I had placed myself in the middle of other people's needs. If there was a problem, I wanted to help. If someone needed something, I wanted to provide it. If something needed fixing, somehow, I felt responsible for helping fix it. But constantly being needed is not the same as being valued. That was a difficult lesson for me.

Making room for myself didn't mean that I stopped loving people or stopped being willing to help. It meant that I finally understood that I could love people without exhausting myself for them. I could be supportive without becoming responsible for everything.

Most importantly, I learned that rest does not have to be earned. Peace does not require an explanation. And saying no does not make me a bad person. Sometimes saying no to someone else is simply how I finally learned to say yes to myself.

Conclusion: What Adulthood Has Taught Me

Being an adult has taught me that although I entered adulthood carrying a lot of childhood baggage, life itself would eventually become one of my greatest teachers. The lessons didn't always come easily. Some came through good people, some through people whose intentions were not good, and others came through heartbreak, heartache, mistakes, consequences, and loss. But all of those experiences taught me something.

They taught me how to become a better person—not only to others, but also to myself.

I learned to pay attention to people and eventually became better at recognizing those who entered my life with genuine intentions and those whose intentions were not always good. I learned that everyone who says they love you does not necessarily know how to love you in a healthy way. But perhaps one of my greatest lessons was realizing that I didn't have to be self-destructive in order to feel loved or to receive love from someone else.

For so much of my younger life, I didn't fully understand what healthy love was supposed to look or feel like. Today, I understand it differently. I learned that real love can provide a safe place for self-reflection rather than a place where you lose yourself. I found that kind of love in my soulmate, James. He has become a mirror for me in many ways—not a mirror that tells me only what I want to hear, but one that has helped me see both my strength and the areas of myself that still need growth.

And maybe that's one of the greatest differences between the woman I was when I entered adulthood and the woman, I am today. I once entered relationships searching for love before I truly understood myself. Today, I understand that healthy love should never require me to lose myself in order to receive it.

Adulthood didn't come with the roadmap I needed. I learned many of its lessons by living them—sometimes painfully. I cannot go back and change the young woman who didn't know what she didn't know. But I can honor her journey by using everything she survived, everything she learned, and even everything she got wrong to make better choices today.

That, for me, is what it means to become a Leveled Woman.