I saw a video the other day saying when you are an adult and live by yourself you do not have your parents to say when to wake up, what and when you eat, to tell you to do homework or brush your teeth. You also have to be the one who celebrates your little everyday accomplishments and pats yourself on the back when things did not go as planned. Basically, being an adult is like being your own parent.
In a way, this is exciting, right? More power and control?
Yeah, not really! I mean it’s a bit tiring. I honestly don’t know how parents do it. Because they have to be their own parents, parents of their children and sometimes parents of their parents. And talking about parents, you know when they tell you not to do something because it’s going to go wrong, but you do it anyway and it goes wrong, and you wonder: ‘wow! How did they know?’
Well, I now know how and I’m here to share the secret.
The other day I went grocery shopping for the week. I bought a bunch of healthy stuff such as chips, chocolate, chocolate cereal, chocolate cookies, chocolate biscuits, chocolate doughnuts… You get the spirit, right? I was on a chocolate spree. I thought to myself: ‘these are all snacks for the week, which I will divide equally by day and time of the day and it’s going to be amazing!’
As you can guess, it was not amazing.
The “snacks” lasted 3 days tops and I had no food for actual lunch and dinner. Moral of the story I had to go to the supermarket again. To be honest, that is not the moral of the story, I will get to that. These grocery episodes did happen more than once, I have to tell you. In fact, more than twice or three times. Until one week I actually got it right. I was so surprised I made it to supermarket day (usually Saturdays) and I still had food to have breakfast that morning.
I smiled and said ‘good job, Ana! You did good this week! Good on ya…’. Another part of adulting is that you talk a lot by yourself. It actually makes me laugh as I write because my mom used to and still do talk by herself frequently and when I was younger, I never quite understood the reasons. Now everything makes sense and world is one again.
Now, onto the parents’ 6th sense secret.
The truth is repetition sort of brings that experience knowledge no one else can give to you. I did have to go under the same problem a few times to figure out what and how much I eat throughout the week as well as how much I should eat. And it was a type of expertise I never really had to master being in a controlled environment like home.
Parents know this stuff because they have been over the same thing enough times to have a good idea of what is going to happen. Like, for instance, how you should buy more than one soap bar because there’s a chance the soap will end in the middle of the week and you will have to stop at the supermarket just to buy soap and will end up buying something you did not want to buy, like, per say, a chocolate croissant.
I did learn this returning home from a grocery shopping day really proud of what I had bought and thinking how I was becoming so smart. Repetition, repetition, repetition. Creating new habits and sticking to them is definitely one way to learn. And this can be applied to many things. For instance, our personal projects and goals. Or whatever really. When you constantly work on something, improvement is imperative.
I’m happy to be getting there, slow and steady, but surely.
Now, the real moral of the story is: I strongly dislike grocery shopping.
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