Where is "The Handbook for the Recently Adult?"

I have long believed that adulthood is poorly organized.

Not in the broad philosophical sense—we’ve always known life is chaos—but in a customer service sense. There is no onboarding. You simply wake up one morning responsible for a health insurance deductible and three kinds of laundry detergent, and are expected to proceed with confidence.

This seems unfair, given that when one dies—at least according to Beetlejuice— a courteous supernatural bureaucracy provides "The Handbook for the Recently Deceased." You are welcomed to your new existential status with documentation. Instructions. Diagrams. A table of contents. And a (admittedly: dubious) customer service system. 

Meanwhile, when you turn 25, society hands you a car-rental eligibility and quietly expects you to know how grief works.

I had always believed adulthood was a ceremony.
At some point, a courier appears. They hand you a leather-bound Adulting Manual. Inside are instructions for taxes, conflict resolution, grief processing, how to iron a shirt without Googling it, and how to not panic when the pharmacy receipt is longer than a novella.
Instead, adulthood appears to be a slow leak of realizations.
No manual! Just episodes?!
This is an outrage. 
Where is "The Handbook for the Recently Adult?"

It would arrive discreetly in unmarked packaging. Perhaps slipped under the door at midnight on your birthday in a tasteful, intimidating binder.

Chapter 1: Your Parents Are Now Mortal.
Chapter 7: Friendships Become Appointments.  
Chapter 14: How to advocate for yourself
Chapter 17: Taxes: You Will Never Fully Understand Them.
(Includes a reassuring flowchart ending in the words “probably correct.”)
Chapter 20:    How Your Childhood Shaped You
Chapter 24:    Rest is Not Laziness
Chapter 29:    Boundaries!
Chapter 32: Bodies Keep The Score and Charge Interest.
You cannot out-schedule biology.
Appendix B: The Apology You Owe Yourself.

There would also be practical matters: how to buy a mattress without entering a personality crisis, how to cook for one without existential despair, how to talk to doctors without saying “sorry” for symptoms.

And yet my suspicion has always been that everyone else received this manual and simply forgot to mention it. I watch people refinance mortgages calmly, select appropriate throw pillows, maintain long-term relationships with dentists—and I think: *Ah, yes. Page 347. The chapter on faking ‘knowing what you’re doing.’

But adulthood, I’m discovering at the ripe old middle age of 42, is not the possession of knowledge. It is the gradual acceptance of permanent partial understanding. Because you see: NOBODY received the manual. We are all just gently pretending, passing notes in the margins of a book that has never been printed.

And occasionally, if we are lucky, I suppose we get to write our own chapter.  

All of this to say that there is a strange comfort of this season of life:
I thought growing up was an event.
When, in fact, it is a practice.
You don’t arrive at adulthood.
You revisit it—repeatedly—at deeper levels of honesty and awareness and forgiveness and acceptance. 

At 42, I am less certain of everything and more peaceful because of it.