The Wayward Podcast Episode 21: Wayward Adulting

Is it wayward to not want to clean the living room? We’re all a little “meh” about this adulting thing from time to time. The Wayward Podcast talks about some of the things we waited so long to be able to do, the prices we have to pay, and how to make it just a tiny bit easier.

On this episode of The Wayward Podcast, Kim and Briana gave us a big fat taste of the realities we all know about being an adult. We have a lot to do, but a lot of laughs and joy comes with it. Is it worth it? Can it be easier? What is the trick?!

I knew this was going to be great because of the write up on the episode. “I don’t wanna!” goes through my adult/infant brain, sometimes dozens of times a day. As the years have gone by, I have altered my outward response to a simple sigh when those times come. As a mother, my top fun thing to not do is dishes. BOOOOO!

I love to cook, but I do NOT love to wash the stupid forks after that. In our beautiful, historic (say ancient) house in the little town where we live, we don’t have a dishwasher or garbage disposal. This is double the fun. It turns “clear the table” into a 55-minute affair. I won’t lie, I’m not a fan at all.

The Wayward Podcast gave us some funny stories about times being an adult can have its perks, and that was a breath of fresh air, to be sure. We also heard a little bit about the things we sure wish someone would have truly helped us expect about the grown-up world to come.

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Sometimes it just feels like the only easiest and logical thing to do is just burn it all down. “Forget this car, I’ll just leave it here, on the side of the road!” I know I’ve had the ever popular thought when walking into my living room some mornings like Briana talked about.

Left to their own devices, I’d swear my kids would be working on a visual proposal to start the new local landfill. I look at it all and just think, “well, they clearly don’t want any of this stuff, I’ll just bag this up and throw it out the window.” That’s my big idea. But, that’s not being an adult. Probably.

But most importantly, we heard some ideas and thoughts from Briana and Kim about how we can maybe make this journey just a little bit smoother. They might have something big here, I thought it was very insightful and I’m a fan. In fact, it’s probably just following that inner desire to just still be a child at times. Make it easy.

As always, if you need or want help enjoying The Wayward Podcast, follow along to the end of this post for links to transcripts and translations of the show. If you want to go listen before we go on, check out “Wayward Adulting” right here. After this point, we’re packed with spoilers, so make sure you’re ready!

Ummm, what?

The excitement of becoming an adult is one that every child goes through. We think, “I can’t wait until I’m older so I can _____.” And I don’t think I’m alone when I say that I was not expecting this. Lord, have mercy, how the decisions we make along the way will affect us later, no one could predict. The Wayward Podcast is here for us.

When we turn 16, we get our license, (do you have gas money? Do you have a car?). When we turn 18, we can vote, move out, (do you have rent?). When we turn 21, we can buy alcohol (explain to your 20-year old friend that buying them beer will land you in jail).

If only we knew all this stuff ahead of time. Some of us heard the advice along the way, “don’t be in a hurry!” they said to us. Well yes, honey, I was in a hurry. I had a little baby, and a great full-time job as Blockbuster Video to go with him.

I get to buy anything I want for dinner, (and then I have to make it). I can stay up all night watching scary movies, but if one of my kids wakes up sick as I’m finally falling asleep, it’s tough luck for us both. These little freedoms we wanted so much come with prices and limits. But there is plenty of fun to be had, too!

Excusable lies

First, let’s talk about what we thought was going to happen. Of course, there are always wayward exceptions, don’t get me wrong. Some of you fine folk wanted and achieved the bliss of 2.5 children and a picket fence, and I applaud you! And maybe some of you even grew up to find love and marry an *insert royal title here* and stuff. Meghan, I’m talking to you *snaps*.

On top of the idealistic fantasies we created through books and Disney tales, we now have the opportunity to make or shatter those fantasies for the little youth of today. Sometimes we are faced with the need to talk to children and that can look a little different than we expected. Inexcusable.

More from Supernatural

• Jensen Ackles and The Winchesters cast kick off #SaveTheWinchesters campaign
• Will The Winchesters be saved? (Can Supernatural fans save the prequel?)
• Did The Winchesters get renewed? (Is The Winchesters season 2 happening?)
• Is a new episode of The Winchesters on tonight? (March 14, 2023)
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Not only do we find that there may be occasions when bending the truth (or plain out converting it) becomes maybe OK, but we actually decide that it’s the easy and best thing. Briana told us a story about another parent using one of these opportunities and pulling her right into it.

She said she and her daughter saw a wild Cali lizard, unheard of in Canada, where they’re from. Another parent reminded his son that there was an important rule about lizards. The child repeated what he had clearly been taught, “if we hold them to our face, they’ll die.”

Briana was not sure at first if this was true, it was so convincing and she had no personal wild lizard truths to fall back on. It only took a moment before the dad was looking to her to verify this for his son. She realized that this was a case of the dad telling this to the son so he wouldn’t make the misstep (perhaps again?) of getting a lizard attached to his nose.

Briana illustrated the point well with this story, sometimes we hear these things just flying out of our mouths to protect people. Sometimes it’s because we’re protecting the child from the bite on the nose when we assume they won’t heed our logical warnings.

And sometimes we tell them “no, you can’t play there,” and it’s actually because we don’t want to deal with getting that Virginia clay out of their jeans later. The next thing you know, a lightbulb is going off in our heads. We’re thinking, “Ohhhh, that’s why they lied.”

This is that fateful day when, for a fleeting moment, you actually consider calling your parents to apologize for screaming “I HATE YOU!” that one time they wouldn’t let you do the thing. Your wayward behavior was a result of what you thought was a bullcrap excuse from them. Now it all makes sense.

Like Kim said, sometimes being an adult means you have to find a way to communicate with children. The theme through this episode of The Wayward Podcast began to surface here. Sometimes, adulting is best accomplished when you find a way to think, or even behave like a child.

The truth

Briana talked about her feelings when she runs into the wayward responsibilities we didn’t know were coming. Sure, we knew we’d have to pay rent or whatever, buy food and t.p., but what about buying a fridge? No one told Briana she would move to a city where apartments didn’t come with one.

And Kim was being a very good adult when she bought a fine warranty to go with her new refrigerator. Oh, yes, she was very responsible. But no one told her how intensely ridiculous it would be to try and use that warranty. No one told her she might have to cross her own personal boundaries and take to Twitter to get them to finally make it right.

It’s no surprise that any of us feel like Briana does from time to time. “I just want to sit and eat Oreos and watch SNL.” I hear ya, Bri, I hear ya. But then we’re faced with the interesting boundary question, “when does procrastination become self-care?” Sometimes it’s important to take an oreo day.

Sometimes it’s important to stop taking them. It’s so easy to slip across that line when we spend so much time depriving ourselves. We keep on adulting, and adulting until we can’t take it anymore. We need to put things down for a day and gather our thoughts. Attack again in the morning, as it were.

But like crash dieting, when we go on and on pushing when we do finally allow ourselves a break, we don’t always want to get back to business right away. Sometimes we just keep doing things that are a bad idea, like Kim mentioned.

She talked about how she was having a bum time on a convention trip recently. She found herself eating a lot of cookies and then feeling bad. She knew it was from the cookies, but she still wanted them, and she still ate them. Bummer. We all do it, though. We shush that little voice inside that says, “What do you think you’re doing? You are an adult!”

Kim said she takes lessons from her daughter sometimes, and I do the same thing, let me tell you. Her daughter sees things plainly and restates them to her, “are you mad or sad?” While Kim reaffirmed we can surely have both together, sometimes it is just plain. And sometimes, the best way to be an adult is to find a way to functionally be a child.

The compromise

Like I mentioned, there is a wayward method that could be the key to everything adulting. With dieting, we deprive ourselves and we crash. Is it reasonable to think the same wouldn’t apply in adulting? We are but humans, regardless of age. Sometimes we still want to eat all the cookies or watch the show and deal with booking our convention flights later.

What if we just go ahead and book the flight then sit and eat the cookies? Or better yet, eat the cookies while we play on the internet and book the flights while we’re on there. I can do the dishes while wearing my superhero costume. I can be a childish adult.

More from Supernatural

• Jensen Ackles and The Winchesters cast kick off #SaveTheWinchesters campaign
• Will The Winchesters be saved? (Can Supernatural fans save the prequel?)
• Did The Winchesters get renewed? (Is The Winchesters season 2 happening?)
• Is a new episode of The Winchesters on tonight? (March 14, 2023)
• The Winchesters Season1 finale explained: Did it connect to Supernatural?

The movie Stepbrothers was full of these little things. The story of two men who would not take responsibilities assigned to adults by society. Their parents spent the movie trying to force them into the mold and it resulted in a fine disaster for the family and the marriage.

When the guys finally fell in line, the parents realized that wasn’t the right path for them. This was not who they were. “It just kills me to see you so crushed and normal” their dad said to them.

My favorite line from that movie is one to which I refer often, in life and in my own brain, “Don’t lose your dinosaur.” The dad told the story of how badly he wanted to be a dinosaur. Everyone told him to grow up and knock it off. So he did. And he never stopped regretting it. He forgot how to be a dinosaur now and he didn’t want that for his own kids.

As Rachel Miner has said frequently on The Wayward Podcast, we fall victim to these social lies. The things we are supposed to do. Yes, we have to pay rent, but who says we can’t do that with our clown job on the boardwalk? I like it.

Maybe I want to sit around painting and watching TV all day. So, I guess I have to sell some art and get a fine job writing about the shows I love (it’s a real thing, y’all). Briana said it herself back in “Wayward Money,” following her passion brought her to a place where she didn’t have to worry.

It was putting her energy into something she didn’t love that sapped her passion. She did not want to make the barbecue for 10 hours, even though she was winning at the barbecue. She wanted to be an actress, a singer, an artist. So she went to win at that. When she turned that attention to her inner dinosaur, she soared. Rawr!

The win

In the long run, The Wayward Podcast took us down a little road to our truth. What we know is that we spend a big chunk of time wondering about the future. When we do that, we get pretty stressed. Briana talked about how we can’t really know what’s coming and that’s basically uncomfortable.

A very interesting point Kim made was that even when we do spend all this time preparing for potential outcomes, it’s often not even useful. Briana addressed how we fill our heads with these negative thoughts- the possibilities of a potential future. We think, “then I’ll be ready,” for this maybe scenario that realistically, probably will never come.

While we make this negative fantasy into our reality, we aren’t living in the present. It’s all about NOW, people. This is the only place and time that even exists. The past is over, the future is unwritten. We’ve heard this on The Wayward Podcast before, I support this life lesson.

Briana’s advice is that being an adult is finding safety in not knowing what’s gonna happen. Kim’s personal story was about her mother. She had written in her journal that she was so terrified about her mother’s death that she was unable to enjoy what time she had with her now.

When that day did come, nothing could have really gotten her ready, after all. Trying to take some of that negative now to spare yourself later is not useful. It only steals from now. Kim bravely sharing that very personal story with us offered an important lesson. They both do this often on the show and it’s what wayward is all about, for me.

This is one of the reasons I love The Wayward Podcast, and these women, so much. They give us their personal feelings, stories, and truths “for free and for fun.” I appreciate that honesty and trust so much. It reminds me to live this way, as well. And I’ll tell you, it’s very freeing.

We don’t have to dwell on whether our way is the right way. We don’t have to know what’s coming because we won’t always be better off if we “knew this would happen.” Don’t get me wrong, we do have to prepare. Briana needs tickets for the convention, but it’s ok to shop for them while eating cookies.

Kim’s words ring very true. There just might be a great benefit in finding a “willingness to replace fear with curiosity.” It’s safe to wonder what will happen tomorrow without having to be afraid of it. We can’t get rid of those worries, but we can reframe them.

Briana learned from her therapist that you can stop, drop, and roll. She mentioned this before in another episode and we can really use this all the time. I have a daughter that is going to benefit from this immediately, I can tell you. And surely we all can.

Stop the negative thought. Drop it! Roll it into something new. We can’t get rid of it, like Kim said, but we can make it into something that we can safely go forward with. I’m keeping this one, 100%. Like Kim said, we can be curious about how this will work out. But we can know that it is going to work out.

So go forward, my wayward friends. Be curious, be prepared. Eat Oreos and watch SNL. Paint a picture and sell it online while watching all the shows. Be an artist, have 2.5 children, run for President. Do whatever your wayward little adult heart desires.

Mow the lawn while you wear your superhero costume and smile at anyone who thinks your a little weird. Maybe you are a little weird or even a lot, but plenty of people embrace that!

Maybe your bold act of freedom of spirit will inspire your neighbor to build that new LEGO TV stand they secretly loved on Pinterest. Whatever you do, do it with pride, and never, ever lose your dinosaur. Carry on!

What’s the one thing you wish someone had helped you understand about adulthood before you got here? What’s one piece of advice you would give to a child about growing up? Tell us your thoughts in the comments below, or send us a tweet!

The Wayward Podcast is available for free listening online at Podbean! If you want to view transcribed or translated versions of the show, check them out here!