On June 10, I graduated from high school. That night, I slept a great deal more than I have any night this year, and today I started my new job working at a restaurant in downtown Kirkland. Then I missed a deadline. More specifically, I missed my deadline for this column. This is a deadline I have known about weeks in advance, which I had both written down in my planner and on my 1-month calendar. Still, in my newly graduated and unanchored state, I managed to completely forget about it.

Because the variables are all tangled, as they often are in life, it is unclear whether my newfound forgetfulness is a result of having graduated from high school or a result of having taken on the new responsibility of flipping burgers. Whatever the reason, however, my life now more closely resembles a typically adult life. I am quickly gaining empathy for my parents and my step-dad, who I have often selfishly thought really ought to have more energy to make me dinner, pack me a lunch, or help me find an old book on Mao I just knew we had.

I figured that I had just as many things to do as they did; after all, walking from class to class was certainly more physically taxing than sitting in an office all day. I thought, dealing with so very many different people, demonstrating academic competence in seven different classes and navigating social twists and turns…surely there was nothing more difficult in having a simple desk job.

My less-than-24-hours as a not-quite-adult have already taught me a great deal about what I have been neglecting every time I reflect on the lack of energy my parents have. Even my 18-year-old self, purportedly full of youthful energy, is easily tired by the new weight of not going to school with the same people I have for so many years now; the new heaviness of actually having a full-time job, of finally growing into legal adulthood, is sinking in. Now I, like my parents and step-dad for years before me, am tired when I come home. I’m still catching on—hopefully I won’t forget more deadlines—and independent of what I have yet to learn, I’m off to a good start, with greater empathy.

Hanna Joo is a 2008 graduate of Inglemoor High.