Adulthood isn't an award they'll give you for being a good child. You can waste... years, trying to get someon... — Lois McMaster Bujold

Adulthood isn't an award they'll give you for being a good child. You can waste... years, trying to get someone to give that respect to you, as though it were a sort of promotion or raise in pay. If only you do enough, if only you are good enough. No. You have to just... take it. Give it to yourself, I suppose. Say, I'm sorry you feel like that and walk away. But that's hard.

Author: Lois McMaster Bujold

Insight: There's something almost rebellious about this idea, and it catches a lot of people off guard. We're trained early to believe respect is something you earn through compliance—get good grades, be polite, do what authority figures ask, and eventually they'll treat you like an adult. Except they often don't. You can spend your twenties or thirties waiting for someone to finally acknowledge you're grown, to stop questioning your choices or treating you like you're still figuring things out. The waiting itself becomes the trap. What makes this quote sting a little is the honesty about how hard it actually is. Taking your own respect back isn't dramatic or rebellious in an obvious way. It's quieter and stranger: it's disagreeing with someone and then simply leaving the conversation. It's setting a boundary without needing them to understand why. It's accepting that some people will never see you as you see yourself, and deciding that's okay. That decision—not angry or performative, just clear—feels almost like a betrayal of everything we learned about earning approval. The real shift happens when you stop waiting for the promotion and just start living like someone who doesn't need it.