I’ve admitted ‘adulting’ – and it exposed me as an imposter

Let me paint a scene: I’m at a music festival in a sea of bodies. The Rubens are playing, and giant screens broadcast every angst-filled expression. We’re sipping batch-made, handcrafted pale ales and watching all the beautiful people – glittered cheeks, Blundstones, Akubras, short skirts and square sunnies – looking like an ad for the beer we’re drinking. The night is young; anything could happen. Someone mentions a spliff.

And then I remember that I’m an adult with a mortgage and two small kids, and this must be some kind of virtual simulation. I don’t belong here; I should be at home by the hearth, darning socks, rustling up a batch of marmalade, or feeding a baby lamb. This festival is a wormhole into a past life in which hangovers were mild and there were no small limbs thumping me awake in the morning. I feel like an impostor.

The term “impostor syndrome” has been thrown around in psychology since a 1978 study. It’s defined as a “persistant internalised fear of being exposed as a fraud”. It usually affects high-achievers who doubt their abilities, but in my case, I have doubts about my adulthood. Who left me alone with these small, dependent humans and financial responsibilities?

“Adulting” – the annoyingly overused word that launched a million hashtags – was coined by Kelly Williams Brown in 2013. Twitter still twats them out: “Just did my tax! #adulting”, “Bought a leather couch that’s not from Kmart #adulting”, or my personal favourite, “A haiku about my life: I am so tired/Where did all my money go/My back hurts #adulting”.

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One night during early parenthood, I was out with another mum-friend at the pub. Our bubs were curled up asleep in Baby Bjorns on our chests. We were sitting near a rowdy bunch of twenty-somethings with whom we fell into conversation. After a few drinks, I turned into the ghost of thirty-somethings, warning them to enjoy their youth before it was too late. “Seriously, it just sneaks up on you. You’re so young and free; don’t waste any opportunities,” I said before my friend gently steered me away.

My twenties were the best. They were so good they kept going, right into my thirties. At 35, I could still be in them. Maybe it’s this need for constant stimulation – new stuff, new shows, new places. I’m restless, bouncing around for the next Big Fun thing. I should have settled down already and learned how to make sourdough, but instead I feel like a kid wagging class, shirking domestic obligations to go have a bottle of wine and use the Pilates reformer machine at the gym.

It turns out Kelly Williams Brown regrets coining adulting. “I am so sorry for it. It haunts me,” she wrote in Vanity Fair last year. She became the poster child for adulting, only to feel as if she had failed all the advice she’d given in her book.

I must look like an adult to my kids, but I’m sure my parents looked older, or at least acted older (although who knows what happened at those dinner parties?)