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Anyone else feel sort of like a perpetual adolescent?
Firstly, although I did eventually manage to get a degree (in my thirties, with a lot of support), I've never had a job, only a couple of very short, minimal-hours volunteering stints, and have been unsuccessful in finding work since graduating. Even most people who are unemployed or long-term sick or retired usually have something that they used to do — they've at least had a job at some point, and thus experienced that major component of the expected adult life. "What do you do?" is a difficult question for me to answer (after a brief reprieve of being able to say "student")… it's what adults ask to get a quick bead on each other, isn't it?
Secondly, I've sort of drifted into the decision not to have children, partly because I know I'm incapable of looking after and raising them, earning the things they'd need, or creating a healthy and safe home environment for them, and partly because I don't want to inflict my heritable disorders on yet another generation (no insult intended to those of you who do have children; there's more than ASD going on for me). Becoming a parent feels like one of the definitive markers of adulthood in our culture, and I've noticed that parents do often have a different, more adult way about them that I can't quite put my finger on.
Thirdly, I don't even remotely have my shit together. All that stuff the kids call adulting… I barely ever do housework and, combined with DP's difficulties, this means I live somewhere that Kim and Aggie would walk straight back out of in horror. I have some kind of undiagnosed circadian rhythm sleep disorder and cannot predict from day to day when I'm going to be awake and when I'll be sleeping. Even when not at all depressed, I procrastinate like there's no tomorrow (
), struggle to motivate myself to do anything I need to do, don't wash for days/weeks, have a terrible diet due to lack of self-control and laziness, don't exercise, don't always take my meds properly, and am just generally exactly like every MNer's worst nightmare of a lazy, unmotivated teen.
Fourthly, my hobbies and preferences don't seem to align at all with how an adult woman apparently "should" be in our society. For example, there was a thread a few days ago asking people what they'd really like for their birthday, which was full of people mentioning sophisticated or mature things like candles, gardening stuff, lovely dressing gowns, handbags, city breaks, and so forth, and I posted quite early on to say that I'd spent my Christmas/birthday money this year on a Steam Deck (a small handheld gaming computer, for those who haven't come across it). I thought there might be at least one or two other women like me! But I'm definitely the outlier there (though there were a couple of people mentioning nice notebooks, and I'm a real sucker for stationery, especially stationery that's too nice to use), and come to think of it, even talking about having Christmas/birthday money to spend makes me sound like a teenager. As that example probably reveals, I love video games and fiddling about with consoles and computers, to modify, jailbreak, customise or otherwise enhance them. I also listen to a lot of music and spent several years enjoying a fairly heavy headphone obsession. When it comes to pets, I like rats and guinea pigs, not more stereotypically grown-up pets like cats or dogs. My favourite TV/film/novel genre tends to be science fiction. My wardrobe only contains jeans, tracky bottoms, t-shirts and hoodies. I don't wear any jewellery or makeup and I don't style my hair. These are just a few off-the-top-of-my-head things that I feel like my culture tells me I should've "grown out of" by adulthood.
Funny thing is, when I was a tiny hyperlexic 3yo (who could read anything in front of her, talked like she'd swallowed a dictionary, and expected to be treated as an equal by all adult conversational partners), or a slightly odd but very academic child in primary school, everyone commented how mature I was (at least, when I wasn't fighting like a Tasmanian devil). But now, adult women — some of my friends and acquaintances, my therapist even — seem to have an urge to mother me, and people seem genuinely surprised I'm as old as I am, even though I genuinely look every year of it. My dad says I've been very clearly the exact same person my entire life, from when I could first interact to the present day 
Maybe I was born 15 and stayed that way…
One box I have managed to tick off on the "are you an acceptably adult adult" cultural checklist is the stable long-term relationship, but even that is a bit odd in my case, and reinforces the general feeling I haven't grown up properly — DP is much, much older than me, and we met when I was an adolescent, so the relationship constantly reinforces a "younger-than" feeling in me.
Well… that was long, but I felt the need to explain what I meant by saying I feel almost like a perpetual adolescent, or at least that I'm perceived that way by others.
Can any of you relate at all?