Entering Adulthood Quotes

Many abandoned children enter adulthood feeling that the world is a dangerous place where they are ill-equipped to defend themselves

They had entered the thorny wilderness, and the golden gates of their childhood had for ever closed behind them.

I was about to enter a borderless terrain between adolescence and adulthood

Most girls, however much they resent their mothers, do become very much like them. Rebellion can rarely survive the aversion therapy that passes for being brought up female. Male violence acts directly on the girl through her father or brother or uncle or any number of male professionals or strangers, as it did and does on her mother, and she too is forced to learn to conform in order to survive. A girl may, as she enters adulthood, repudiate the particular set of males with whom her mother is allied, run with a different pack as it were, but she will replicate her mother’s patterns in acquiescing to male authority within her own chosen set. Using both force and threat, men in all camps demand that women accept abuse in silence and shame, tie themselves to hearth and home with rope made of self-blame, unspoken rage, grief, and resentment.

It doesn't matter what the manifest problem was in our childhood family. In a home where a child is emotionally deprived for one reason or another that child will take some personal emotional confusion into his or her adult life. We may spin our spiritual wheels in trying to make up for childhood's personal losses, looking for compensation in the wrong places and despairing that we can find it. But the significance of spiritual rebirth through Jesus Christ is that we can mature spiritually under His parenting and receive healing compensation for these childhood deprivations. Three emotions that often grow all out of proportion in the emotionally deprived child are fear, guilt, and anger. The fear grows out of the child's awareness of the uncontrollable nature of her fearful environment, of overwhelming negative forces around her. Her guilt, her profound feelings of inadequacy, intensify when she is unable to put right what is wrong, either in the environment or in another person, no matter how hard she tries to be good. If only she could try harder or be better, she could correct what is wrong, she thinks. She may carry this guilt all her life, not knowing where it comes from, but just always feeling guilty. She often feels too sorry for something she has done that was really not all that serious. Her anger comes from her frustration, perceived deprivation, and the resultant self-pity. She has picked up an anger habit and doesn't know how much trouble it is causing her. A fourth problem often follows in the wake of the big three: the need to control others and manipulate events in order to feel secure in her own world, to hold her world together- to make happen what she wants to happen. She thinks she has to run everything. She may enter adulthood with an illusion of power and a sense of authority to put other people right, though she has had little success with it. She thinks that all she has to do is try harder, be worthier, and then she can change, perfect, and save other people. But she is in the dark about what really needs changing."I thought I would drown in guilt and wanted to fix all the people that I had affected so negatively. But I learned that I had to focus on getting well and leave off trying to cure anyone around me." Many of those around - might indeed get better too, since we seldom see how much we are a key part of a negative relationship pattern. I have learned it is a true principle that I need to fix myself before I can begin to be truly helpful to anyone else. I used to think that if I were worthy enough and worked hard enough, and exercised enough anxiety (which is not the same thing as faith), I could change anything. My power and my control are illusions. To survive emotionally, I have to turn my life over to the care of that tender Heavenly Father who was really in charge. It is my own spiritual superficiality that makes me sick, and that only profound repentance, that real change of heart, would ultimately heal me. My Savior is much closer than I imagine and is willing to take over the direction of my life: "I am the vine, ye are the branches: He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit: for without me, ye can do nothing." (John 15:5). As old foundations crumble, we feel terribly vulnerable. Humility, prayer and flexibility are the keys to passing through this corridor of healthy change while we experiment with truer ways of dealing with life. Godly knowledge, lovingly imparted, begins deep healing, gives tools to live by and new ways to understand the gospel.

Millennials bring a unique perspective to business. Those of us who were in college and entering adulthood and beginning our careers during the global recession that started in 2008 have a unique view on business and economics.

In idyllic small towns I sometimes see teenagers looking out of place in their garb of desperation, the leftover tatters and stains and slashes of the fashion of my youth. For this phase of their life, the underworld is their true home, and in the grit and underbelly of a city they could find something that approximates it. Even the internal clock of adolescents changes, making them nocturnal creatures for at least a few years. All through childhood you grow toward life and then in adolescence, at the height of life, you begin to grow toward death. This fatality is felt as an enlargement to be welcomed and embraced, for the young in this culture enter adulthood as a prison, and death reassures them that there are exits. “I have been half in love with easeful death,” said Keats who died at twenty-six and so were we, though the death we were in love with was only an idea then.

That is where we stand as a nation today. Twenty years ago, our society began regularly prescribing psychiatric drugs to children and adolescents, and now one out of every fifteen Americans enters adulthood with a "serious mental illness." That is proof of the most tragic sort that our drug-based paradigm of care is doing a great deal more harm than good. The medicating of children and youth became commonplace only a short time ago, and already it has put millions onto a path of lifelong illness.

The sense of adventure and curiosity to see what the future holds is the other side of serenity. It, too, is a spiritual state most attractive in people in transition, whether entering adulthood or preparing for death. -Sexuality and Spiritual Growth

So the challenge I face with children is the redemption of adulthood. We must make it evident that maturity is the fulfillment of childhood and adolescence, not a diminishing; that it is an affirmation of life, not a denial; that it is entering fully into our essential selves.

We don’t enter adulthood as fully formed adults, nor do we enter adulthood as fully formed readers. When I graduated, I knew I still had a lot of growing up to do, but nobody told me I had to grow up as a reader too. Every reader goes through this rite of passage: the transition from having books chosen for us to choosing books for ourselves. When given the choice, some choose not to read. But you, dear reader, moved from being told what to read to choosing for yourself.

But, above all it is the education of adolescents that is important, because adolescence is the time when the child enters on the state of [adult]hood and becomes a member of society.

I entered adulthood believing that capitalism was a scam, but I've instead found that it's a kind of alchemy. You combine hard work, creativity, and self-determination, and things start to happen.

The inner feeling of emptiness from which passive dependent people suffer is the direct result of their parents’ failure to fulfill their needs for affection, attention and care during their childhood. It was mentioned in the first section that children who are loved and cared for with relative consistency throughout childhood enter adulthood with a deepseated feeling that they are lovable and valuable and therefore will be loved and cared for as long as they remain true to themselves. Children growing up in an atmosphere in which love and care are lacking or given with gross inconsistency enter adulthood with no such sense of inner security. Rather, they have an inner sense of insecurity, a feeling of “I don’t have enough” and a sense that the world is unpredictable and ungiving, as well as a sense of themselves as being questionably lovable and valuable. It is no wonder, then, that they feel the need to scramble for love, care and attention wherever they can find it, and once having found it, cling to it with a desperation that leads them to unloving, manipulative, Machiavellian behavior that destroys the very relationships they seek to preserve. As also indicated in the previous section, love and discipline go hand in hand, so that unloving, uncaring parents are people lacking in discipline, and when they fail to provide their children with a sense of being loved, they also fail to provide them with the capacity for self-discipline. Thus the excessive dependency of the passive dependent individuals is only the principal manifestation of their personality disorder. Passive dependent people lack self-discipline. They are unwilling or unable to delay gratification of their hunger for attention. In

To some extent, most of us are unconsciously driven by our ego-ideal. The ego-ideal is simply a set of ideas in the mind about how we should show up, how we should look, feel, behave, think. This collection of ideas and mental images is created out of fragments of highly charged experiences with important love objects in our lives, and out of the messages we receive in our interactions with the world as we grow. It remains mostly out of our awareness. The blueprint for the ego-ideal is first laid down by parental injunctions about how to be, or how not to be. These highly charged messages are taken in whole. They become the foundation of our scripts for life. The ego-ideal is certainly capable of modification and change, but for most of us it's deeply hardwired into our unconscious by the time we enter early adulthood, and it matures only marginally in later life.

By some definitions I am a millennial. I was born in 1980 and entered adulthood in the early 2000s, and my transition from child to adult lasted over a decade. However, I don’t identify as a millennial. If I had been born five months earlier I would have been branded Generation X, a label I don’t feel a strong connection to either. And no brand savvy sociologist came up with a term catchy enough to enter the zeitgeist for the in-betweeners born on the cusp.

... people with a secure attachment style view their partners' well-being as their responsibility. As long as they have reason to believe their partner is in some sort of trouble, they'll continue to back him or her. Mario Mikulincer and Phillip Shaver, in their book Attachment in Adulthood, show that people with a secure attachment style are more likely than others to forgive their partner for wrongdoing. They explain this as a complex combination of cognitive and emotional abilities: "Forgiveness requires difficult regulatory maneuvers . . . understanding a transgressor's needs and motives, and making generous attributions and appraisals concerning the transgressor's traits and hurtful actions . . . Secure people are likely to offer relatively benign explanations of their partners' hurtful actions and be inclined to forgive the partner." Also, as we've seen previously in this chapter, secure people just naturally dwell less on the negative and can turn off upsetting emotions without becoming defensively distant. The good news is that people with a secure attachment style have healthy instincts and usually catch on very early that someone is not cut out to be their partner. The bad news is that when secure people do, on occasion, enter into a negative relationship, they might not know when to call it quits--especially if it's a long-term, committed relationship in which they feel responsible for their partner's happiness.

Children do not always appreciate their parents encouraging them to explore and grow. The selfishness of a child manifests itself in his or her intent to remain a child and never enter an adult world of distress, disappointment, and jadedly surrendering an envisioned life by making commitments that limit boundless options.

What you describe is parasitism, not love. When you require another individual for your survival, you are a parasite on that individual. There is no choice, no freedom involved in your relationship. It is a matter of necessity rather than love. Love is the free exercise of choice. Two people love each other only when they are quite capable of living without each other but choose to live with each other. We all-each and every one of us-even if we try to pretend to others and to ourselves that we don't have dependency needs and feelings, all of us have desires to be babied, to be nurtured without effort on our parts, to be cared for by persons stronger than us who have our interests truly at heart. No matter how strong we are, no matter how caring and responsible and adult, if we look clearly into ourselves we will find the wish to be taken care of for a change. Each one of us, no matter how old and mature, looks for and would like to have in his or her life a satisfying mother figure and father figure. But for most of us these desires or feelings do not rule our lives; they are not the predominant theme of our existence. When they do rule our lives and dictate the quality of our existence, then we have something more than just dependency needs or feelings; we are dependent. Specifically, one whose life is ruled and dictated by dependency needs suffers from a psychiatric disorder to which we ascribe the diagnostic name "passive dependent personality disorder." It is perhaps the most common of all psychiatric disorders. People with this disorder, passive dependent people, are so busy seeking to be loved that they have no energy left to love…..This rapid changeability is characteristic of passive dependent individuals. It is as if it does not matter whom they are dependent upon as long as there is just someone. It does not matter what their identity is as long as there is someone to give it to them. Consequently their relationships, although seemingly dramatic in their intensity, are actually extremely shallow. Because of the strength of their sense of inner emptiness and the hunger to fill it, passive dependent people will brook no delay in gratifying their need for others. If being loved is your goal, you will fail to achieve it. The only way to be assured of being loved is to be a person worthy of love, and you cannot be a person worthy of love when your primary goal in life is to passively be loved. Passive dependency has its genesis in lack of love. The inner feeling of emptiness from which passive dependent people suffer is the direct result of their parents' failure to fulfill their needs for affection, attention and care during their childhood. It was mentioned in the first section that children who are loved and cared for with relative consistency throughout childhood enter adulthood with a deep seated feeling that they are lovable and valuable and therefore will be loved and cared for as long as they remain true to themselves. Children growing up in an atmosphere in which love and care are lacking or given with gross inconsistency enter adulthood with no such sense of inner security. Rather, they have an inner sense of insecurity, a feeling of "I don't have enough" and a sense that the world is unpredictable and ungiving, as well as a sense of themselves as being questionably lovable and valuable. It is no wonder, then, that they feel the need to scramble for love, care and attention wherever they can find it, and once having found it, cling to it with a desperation that leads them to unloving, manipulative, Machiavellian behavior that destroys the very relationships they seek to preserve. In summary, dependency may appear to be love because it is a force that causes people to fiercely attach themselves to one another. But in actuality it is not love; it is a form of antilove. Ultimately it destroys rather than builds relationships, and it destroys rather than builds people.

If one group of young people approach adulthood as an aesthetic experience, another group tries to treat adulthood as much as possible like a continuation of school. These students usually went to competitive colleges and tend to come from the upper strata of society. They were good at getting admitted into places, so they apply to companies that have competitive hiring procedures. As students, they enjoyed the borrowed prestige of high-status colleges, so as adults they enjoy the borrowed prestige of high-status companies and service organizations. As students, they were good at winning gold stars, and so they follow a gold-star-winning kind of life when they enter the workforce, and their parents get to brag that they work at Google or Williams & Connolly, or that they go to Harvard Business School.

As a result of the experience of consistent parental love and caring throughout childhood, such fortunate children will enter adulthood not only with a deep internal sense of their own value but also with a deep internal sense of security. All children are terrified of abandonment, and with good reason. This fear of abandonment begins around the age of six months, as soon as the child is able to perceive itself to be an individual, separate from its parents. For with this perception of itself as an individual comes the realization that as an individual it is quite helpless, totally dependent and totally at the mercy of its parents for all forms of sustenance and means of survival. To the child, abandonment by its parents is the equivalent of death. Most parents, even when they are otherwise relatively ignorant or callous, are instinctively sensitive to their children’s fear of abandonment and will therefore, day in and day out, hundreds and thousands of times, offer their children needed reassurance: “You know Mommy and Daddy aren’t going to leave you behind”; “Of course Mommy and Daddy will come back to get you”; “Mommy and Daddy aren’t going to forget about you.” If these words are matched by deeds, month in and month out, year in and year out, by the time of adolescence the child will have lost the fear of abandonment and in its stead will have a deep inner feeling that the world is a safe place in which to be and protection will be there when it is needed. With this internal sense of the consistent safety of the world, such a child is free to delay gratification of one kind or another, secure in the knowledge that the opportunity for gratification, like home and parents, is always there, available when needed.

After a childhood of bickering and a hostile adolescence, they had entered adulthood almost estranged. Was it possible that now, with so many losses behind them, they could enter a new stage of understanding and acceptance?

You enter adulthood and you lose all sense of wonder. Who is really the child and who is the adult?

Entering College was probably the scariest and exciting things I have experienced in my life.

Typically only the incivility of the less powerful toward the more powerful can be widely understood as such, and thus be subject to such intense censure. Which is what made #metoo so fraught and revolutionary. It was a period during which some of the most powerful faced repercussion. The experience of having patriarchal control compromised felt, perhaps ironically, like a violation, a diminishment, a threat to professional standing—all the things that sexual harassment feels like to those who’ve experienced it. Frequently, in those months, I was asked about how to address men’s confusion and again, their discomfort: How were they supposed to flirt? What if their respectful and professional gestures of affiliation had been misunderstood? Mothers told me of sons worried about being misinterpreted, that expression of their affections might be heard as coercion, their words or intentions read incorrectly, that they would face unjust consequences that would damage their prospects. The amazing thing was the lack of acknowledgment that these anxieties are the normal state for just about everyone who is not a white man: that black mothers reasonably worry every day that a toy or a phone or a pack of Skittles might be seen as a gun, that their children’s very presence—sleeping in a dorm room, sitting at a Starbucks, barbecuing by a river, selling lemonade on the street—might be understood as a threat, and that the repercussions might extend far beyond a dismissal from a high-paying job or expulsion from a high-profile university, and instead might result in arrest, imprisonment, or execution at the hands of police or a concerned neighbor. Women enter young adulthood constantly aware that their inebriation might be taken for consent, or their consent for sluttiness, or that an understanding of them as having been either drunk or slutty might one day undercut any claim they might make about having been violently aggressed upon. Women enter the workforce understanding from the start the need to work around and accommodate the leering advances and bad jokes of their colleagues, aware that the wrong response might change the course of their professional lives. We had been told that our failures to extend sympathy to the white working class—their well-being diminished by unemployment and drug addictions—had cost us an election; now we were being told that a failure to feel for the men whose lives were being ruined by harassment charges would provoke an angry antifeminist backlash. But with these calls came no acknowledgment of sympathies that we have never before been asked to extend: to black men who have always lived with higher rates of unemployment and who have faced systemically higher prison sentences and social disapprobation for their drug use; to the women whose careers and lives had been ruined by ubiquitous and often violent harassment. Now the call was to consider the underlying pain of those facing repercussions. Rose McGowan, one of Weinstein’s earliest and most vociferous accusers, recalled being asked “in a soft NPR voice, ‘What if what you’re saying makes men uncomfortable?’ Good. I’ve been uncomfortable my whole life. Welcome to our world of discomfort.”34 Suddenly, men were living with the fear of consequences, and it turned out that it was not fun. And they very badly wanted it to stop. One of the lessons many men would take from #metoo was not about the threat they had posed to women, but about the threat that women pose to them.

Funny how you plod through childhood wishing for the clock to move faster, so you can enter the coveted world of adulthood where you can make your own decisions and plot your own course. Next thing you know you’re wading through the uncertainty of your twenties and then trying to fix the mistakes you made in your thirties. Then without warning the pace quickens, The forties come and go and by fifty—everything takes off at warp speed.

Against all expectation, it seems, early loss can be a stimulus to achievement. As one researcher puts it, the awareness of vulnerability can have a paradoxical strengthening effect: “The question of morality and conscience, a hallmark of creativity, enters with the sense of injustice that the orphaned child feels and continues to feel into adulthood,” and eventually develops into “a thirst for identity, a need to imprint oneself on the world.”3

Entering college students show the same trend: in 2016, only 37% said that “becoming successful in a business of my own” was important, down from 50% in 1984 (adjusted for relative centrality). So, compared to GenX college students, iGen’ers are less likely to be drawn to entrepreneurship. These beliefs are affecting actual behavior. A Wall Street Journal analysis of Federal Reserve data found that only 3.6% of households headed by adults younger than 30 owned at least part of a private company in 2013, down from 10.6% in 1989. All the talk about the young generation being attracted to entrepreneurship turns out to be just that—talk.

But for some of us, the promotion to adulthood, or at least its challenges, is so jarring, so sudden, that we enter into it unprepared and might be undone by it.

Initially, he was entranced by the professional investing industry that was blossoming as he entered adulthood. At the time of writing the Financial Analysts Journal article, Bogle was a young hotshot executive of Wellington, one of the oldest and largest mutual fund managers in America. But an odd combination of disaster and serendipity in the mid-1970s set him on the path to upending the industry he once venerated. “There’s nobody more religious than a convert,” observes Jim Riepe, one of Bogle’s closest colleagues in the founding of Vanguard, as a way of explaining the remarkable metamorphosis.

What Knowledge and Skills Will Our Children Need to Be Successful Adults? If the fundamental purpose of school is to prepare our children to be successful adults and citizens, this is logically the next question we should ask. To be sure, the world for which we are preparing our students today is not the world most educators entered when we transitioned from childhood to adulthood.

almost all of us appear to enter adulthood consciously identified with either a style of separateness or of connectedness, while unconsciously disowning the opposite energy.

So many disorders of the mind can be traced back to the primordial forest. It is why it is such a unique symbol in fairy tales and myths. Leaving home and entering the Forest is a metaphor for shedding the comforts and traumas of childhood and entering the wilderness of adulthood.

There was no official ceremony that brought my childhood to an end. Instead, crises or other circumstances presented me with adult-sized responsibilities and obligations that I had to meet one way or another. For some boys, this happens later - in their late teens or even twenties - allowing them to grow organically into adulthood. But for some of us, the promotion to adulthood, or at least its challenges, is so jarring, is so sudden, that we enter into it unprepared and might be undone by it.

America’s failure to invest properly in its most valuable, and most fragile, human infrastructure—its young people awkwardly entering adulthood—can only be seen as a gobsmacking failure.

And somewhere between the late thirties and early forties when we enter midlife, we also have the opportunity for true adulthood, whereupon we proceed either to wither inside our husks or to regather and re-pot ourselves for the flowering into our full authenticity.

…she smiled suddenly, once in a while, at no one in particular; smiled at a dim, wordless thought of her own. She felt as if her ended childhood had been a cold shower, gay, hard and invigorating, and now she was entering her morning, with her work before her, with so much to be done.

You think once you've gotten into the company, you've made it. It's all over. The struggle and the suffering. The longing and the dreams. Part of it is just the way we treat life, like there's this dividing line between childhood and adulthood that we'll arrive at, pass through. But you never do cross over, because it doesn't actually exist. Officially entering the company was the greatest achievement of my life, I'd done it. Alone among our classmates, Margo, Lindsey and I had realized our dream. Our peers had to put themselves through the grueling, dispiriting process of auditioning for other, lesser countries throughout France and Europe. But after all of that, then, I was just there in the company, and I had the lowest possible rank. As always, another hoop to jump through, another step to climb, when I was a student, I thought I wouldn't care that being part of POB would be enough. Of course it wasn't, I wanted to be the best.

Our children need us to be intentional about equipping them to navigate smartphones and social media yet laissez-faire about letting them explore new places, skin their knees, and fail at projects, so they’re not gripped by fear and anxiety as they enter adulthood.

Solon and Pisistratus were very fond of one another. We are told they entered into a love affair when Pisistratus was a good-looking lad in his teens. Despite a wide gap of thirty years between them, this is not implausible. Solon was highly sexed, if we may judge from his poetry, where he writes of the delights of falling in love “with a boy in the lovely flower of youth,/Desiring his thighs and sweet mouth.” However, it would be wrong to believe that either man was necessarily, in our modern sense, gay. This is because from the eighth century onwards the Greek upper classes established and maintained a system of pederasty as a form of higher education. A fully grown adult male, usually in his twenties, would look out for a boy in his mid-teens and become his protector and guide. His task was to see him through from adolescence into adulthood and to act as a kind of moral tutor. Sex was not compulsory, but it was under certain strictly defined conditions allowed. The older man was the active lover/partner or erastes and the teenager was the loved one, or eromenos. Buggery was absolutely out of bounds and brought shame on any boy who allowed it to be done to him. It could have the most serious consequences, as the fate of Periander showed. This famous tyrant of Corinth in the seventh century unwisely teased his eromenos in the presence of other people with the question: “Aren’t you pregnant yet?” The boy was so upset by the insult that he killed Periander. A popular and acceptable technique for achieving orgasm was intercrural sex: both participants stood up and the erastes inserted his erect penis between the thighs of the eromenos and rubbed it to and fro. The youth was not meant to enjoy his lover’s attentions or show signs of arousal; rather, he was making a disinterested gift of himself to someone he admired. The great Athenian writer of tragic dramas, Aeschylus, wrote a play about the love between the two Greek heroes, Achilles and Patroclus. It was called The Myrmidons, after the warriors whom Achilles commanded during the Trojan War. Achilles is presented as the erastes, and reproaches his lover, in rather roundabout terms, for declining an intercrural proposition.

Conclusion: Adulthood at Last, Ready or Not We have seen in this chapter that the feeling of being in-between is a common part of being an emerging adult. Entering adulthood is no longer as definite and clear-cut as getting married. On the contrary, the road to young adulthood is circuitous, and the end of it usually does not come until the late twenties. Young people reach adulthood not because of a single event, but as a consequence of the gradual process of becoming self-sufficient and learning to stand alone. As they gradually take responsibility for themselves, make independent decisions, and pay their own way through life, the feeling grows in them that they have become adults. However, they view this achievement with mixed emotions. The independence of emerging adulthood is welcome, and they take pride in being able to take care of themselves without relying on their parents’ assistance. Nevertheless, the responsibilities of adulthood can be onerous and stressful, and emerging adults sometimes look back with nostalgia on a childhood and adolescence that seem easier in some ways than their lives now. Claims that most emerging adults experience a “quarterlife crisis”35 in their twenties may be exaggerated; life satisfaction and well-being go up from adolescence to emerging adulthood, for most people. But even if it is not exactly a “crisis,” emerging adulthood is experienced as a time of new and not always welcome responsibilities, a time of not just exhilarating independence and exploration but stress and anxiety as well. Despite the difficulties that come along with managing their own lives, most emerging adults look forward to a future they believe is filled with promise. Whether their lives now are moving along nicely or appear to be going nowhere, they almost unanimously believe that eventually they will be able to create for themselves the kind of life they want. They will find their soul mate, or at least a loving and compatible marriage partner. They will find that dream job, or at least a job that will be enjoyable and meaningful. Eventually this happy vision of the future will be tested against reality, and for many of them the result will be a jarring collision that will force them to readjust their expectations. But during emerging adulthood everything still seems possible. Nearly everyone still believes their dreams will prevail, whatever perils the world may hold for others. Are they too optimistic? Oh yes, at least from the perspective of their elders, who know all too well the likely fate of youthful dreams. Yet is important to understand their optimism as a source of strength, as a psychological resource they will need to draw upon during a stage of life that is often difficult. Given their high expectations for life, they are almost certain to fall short, but it is their self-belief that allows them to get up again after they have been knocked down, even multiple times. They may be optimistic, but the belief that they will ultimately succeed in their pursuit of happiness gives them the confidence and energy to make it through the stresses and uncertainty of the emerging adult years. NOTES Preface to the Second Edition 1.

The question of morality and conscience, a hallmark of creativity, enters with the sense of injustice that the orphaned child feels and continues to feel into adulthood,” and eventually develops into “a thirst for identity, a need to imprint oneself on the world.”3

The realisation that his adulthood, into which he was entering now so definitively, and which would last all the rest of his life, would have to be lived without his father. That he was becoming a person his father would never know.