Reader asks if being disappointed with adult life is a normal feeling

Dear Carolyn: Is being an adult just the process of becoming more accepting of disappointment in life?

I’m in my 30s and awakening to the fact that nothing in the life I have spent a decade building — relationships, career, skills, hobbies, home — is ful illing to me at all. Is that normal? Do people walk away and start over or is there another option?

Is the other option to get over myself? I don’t have kids but I am in a committed relationship with a mortgage and pets.

— Being an Adult

Being an adult means giving up on fairy tales, yes, so it does include learning to accept disappointment.

But adulthood also means agency, which is

much better than fairy tales.

Anyway. This isn’t to minimize the pain you’re in right now. Or the confusion you probably feel: It’s possible you chose the wrong partner-careerhobbies, sure, or you could have grown or changed a lot since you made your choices, or you could have an unrelated health issue that’s blurring the lens through which you view everything in your life. To sort this out, it’s going to take some hard work and patience and scary challenges to your status quo.

But you have the wherewithal to do just that. You can get a screening for depression, to start; I’m always suspicious of across-the-board alienation.

And, you can schedule some time out of your routine to help you gain some perspective. Just changing what your eyes rest on, what you eat, whom you talk to, what you listen to, can jog things loose.

And you can identify changes you’re able to make, in order of increasing life-disruptiveness, starting with the smallest of tweaks — to your diet, to your exercise habits, to your sleep habits, to your hobbies. You can also research changes right up to the line of actually making them, to see if anything piques your interest.

I said this was scary and meant it. Even an unhappy rut feels safe. But the risk of risk-avoidance is deceptively, ironically high. The unhappier you get, the less thoughtful your changes are likely to be. Reason this through while you still can.