The Tragic Passage Into Adulthood

In this episode, I reflect on rereading Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses as a coming-of-age novel and bring it into conversation with one of my favorite books from high school, J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. I explore the tragic and beautiful passage into adulthood — the loss of innocence, the grief of seeing the world more clearly, and the difficult courage it takes to keep loving, working, and showing up anyway.I also connect these themes to my work as a therapist with adolescents and young adults, where therapy can become a kind of initiation space — a place to grieve what is lost, discover what is gained, and learn how to care less about the crowd while caring more about the right people. Along the way, I bring in the idea of la lucha — the struggle, the fight, the refusal to let the bastards get you down — as part of what adulthood asks of us.