question of the weekend: What made you finally feel like a grownup?

I’ve got too much grownup stuff on my mind at the moment. I need to file my first tax return in the U.K. this month, which is a chore and a worry. And I need to find a new place to live by the end of the month, which is a hassle at the best of times, and much worse when operating on a starving-writer budget. This is grownup stuff that’s no fun.

But sometimes being a grownup is fun. Like how my little cousin, who was then around nine, was astonished that I was “allowed” to wear my pajamas all day; I explained that that was one of the nice things about being a grownup.

What made you finally feel like a grownup? (I hope it’s a nice thing, but I suppose it could be an unpleasant thing, too.) For me, it was the moment in my first apartment, when I was only 19 years old, when I realized that the fridge was all mine, that I could put anything into it that I wanted, and that no one else would have anything to say about it. Not that my parents, when I had been living in their house, had been fridge tyrants or anything, which I think is partly why this realization struck me so hard and why I’ve never forgotten it. It had never occurred to me previously that there could be anything special about having one’s own fridge until I did.