Growing up, independence was my drug of choice. I craved it to the point of obsession; I lied and schemed to get a taste beyond the surveillance of paternalistic authorities, and I got into frustratingly circular arguments with anyone who stood in between me and my fix. As time passed and I was granted more opportunities to assert my autonomy, I only pined for more, developing a propensity to overreact when liberty, specifically mine, was the subject of discussion. Then college happened, and it certainly let freedom ring. But as the tried and true adage goes, with freedom comes responsibility, and the college years present several challenging and unexpected tests in self-sufficiency.
The 'self' required to suffice refers to individuals and groups in much the same way, so my interest isn't in personal autonomy so much as it is in those initial situations that try and develop our ability to navigate the real world. Basically, we're talking about becoming a Big Kid. It occurred to me recently that spending a parent-free night at a summerhouse is exactly the kind of situation that necessitates Big Kid skills. I spent part of Memorial Day weekend at a friend's beach house in southern Maryland. Isolated in a bucolic and self-contained world of beach bonfires and excessive quantities of alcohol, ten compatriots and I attempted to sate our wants and needs without exactly knowing how. We came to appreciate the requisite planning and elementary wisdom it takes to enjoy a night at the beach. Things like lighting a grill, making hamburgers, and building that bonfire were decidedly team efforts and didn't always go according to plan (i.e., we didn't necessarily plan to make mini-hamburgers, exactly like a regular hamburger in every way but one eighth the size), but we survived. More importantly, we realized that we aren't quite Big Kids yet, but we're well on our way.
The situations that test our self-sufficiency have little in common; they range from throwing a dinner party to the laborious process of moving into a new apartment. What they have in common is that they require newly liberated, youngish adults to gather their knowledge and any other means at their disposal to survive without the help of those who are more experienced in this real world business. The beauty of the so-called real world is that the veterans of independence who are our parents, older siblings and various other mentors are a phone call away, and their sound and sage advice is always available to guide us towards successful classification as a Big Kid.
