By Persefone Neeve, OWA Summer Intern 2026
This summer I finished my first year of college and started an internship at One Wealth Advisors. One of my assignments was to write a perspective piece, so here’s mine: a little story about the transition from kid life to adulting, which I am sure many of you have experienced, and one I’ve decided to call “kidulting.” Along the way, I learned a few things about perseverance and grace that I am excited to share.
Some context. My family spends summers in Lake Tahoe, but my internship is in SF, so I only get to be with them, and my boyfriend who lives there, on weekends. Partway through the summer, I was driving back from a few days at the lake and suddenly felt very upset. It seemed like I was leaving everything I loved behind to go face the hard, cold, real world alone. Just as I crossed the Golden Gate Bridge, the sunny sky turned to blowing fog, which, thematically, felt a little on the nose. I called my boyfriend, and he reminded me of something from the weekend before.
We’d been walking around the city when I spotted a stylish young woman heading the other way, coffee in hand, rocking ballet flats, clearly on her way to a job she loved. I told him that one day, I wanted to be her, someone with a life she’d figured out and built for herself. The thing is, I’m already in the process of building that exact life. I just hadn’t noticed, because apparently it doesn’t come with a soundtrack or a moment of realization when you get there.
I’d romanticized the corporate-Pinterest aesthetic (immaculate apartment, a first salary with a comma in it, closet full of Reformation) without understanding what actually goes into it. Turns out what goes into it is getting up on the days you don’t want to. Every adult I know does this. Shows up tired, or upset, or unsure, and pushes through anyway. That’s not a footnote to adulting, it is adulting. I want to look back in five years knowing I did what it took to get where I was going, so I’m trying (trying!) to treat discomfort less like a hurdle and more like a door to whoever I’m becoming.
But perseverance without gentleness is just grinding, and no one wants to hear about that at their five-year reunion. Life is hard, and you rarely know what someone else is carrying, so the same discomfort that’s teaching you to keep going should also teach you to be kind, to yourself, and to everyone else quietly pushing through their own version of it. Do the scared thing, the sad thing, the nervous thing. Just do it gently and assume everyone around you is doing the same.
Life is more marvelous than I could’ve imagined, and also (shocker) harder. Carry on, in perseverance and in kindness.
I’ll leave you with a nudge toward Ada Limón’s poem “Instructions on Not Giving Up,” which I was handed in high school and still come back to more than I’d like to admit.
“Instructions on Not Giving Up”
More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.
