I don’t desire to mourn or talk about the scope of my entire career as a student just yet. The school year began only a few months ago, and it doesn’t feel like it’s my reality. I am still stuck to the comfort of my parents. All I’ve actually come to accept is that I will stay rooted to the remains of my childhood for as long as I can.
A year or so ago, I wrote an opinion piece about my considered view of adulthood. I was 16 going on 17 then. I wasn’t too far off yet I hadn’t been teasing the fast pace of time when I wrote it. My hold was weak, my arm, when extended, hardly had a reach that nearly touched the brim. But I felt ready. I figured I would do fine and that acceptance would slip over me easily.
I used to live for the future. It was a pursuit of sovereignty on my part. The need to take control of my life, to take charge and move balanced by the root of my soles was temptation in pure. As a child I would follow that thread of illusion that kept me refusing to be idle, or to stand with the present. All I ever wanted was to be done with it, move on, and forget.
As a teen, however, I feel the need to remedy my mistakes. My shame is overbearing and I ache for the simplicity of innocence. I’m a few months away from becoming legally an adult, and it has come to resemble the very cessation of my world. There’s so much I will lose. Ironically, I yearn for more time with the truths of the very same childhood I escaped. A feeling that only spirals.
In truth, what worries me most is the lack of answers and my own uncertainty for the future. There’s too much at risk, when aging. Adulthood will strip me from all I’ve ever known and I don’t know if I am prepared for it. I mean, who is? I’m afraid I won’t know when to step away from the arms of the mother that held and shielded me. I won’t be able to stand alone, and carry the weight of myself into the unpredictability. Or, I won’t stand to carry out a life without having by my side the tight threads of the people in my life today.
As a result, I can’t let go of what has been my anchor for so long: school. For more than a decade, its routine has been all that I have followed. It’s been shared with my peers, a journey forged by long hours of work, stress over essays and pitiful reassurances after bad exams. It has never felt isolating, even if it has sometimes been lonely. I’ve latched onto familiar faces and held close to friends from my childhood. Joining the school’s newspaper was probably the biggest and boldest choice I’ve made in my career and I’m glad to say I don’t regret it.
Yet the feeling remains. I think my youth slipped away in buried ideas, and turned down opportunities. I think it has been tossed in lost counts of hours, days, and years that have been spent reminiscent of what I once held. Which is the very same issue I face today; a struggle that conflicts my experiences.
If there’s any lesson to learn from it, my journey as an indecisive, I’d say that it’s to recognize time’s fragility. Its folded edges are a little much for our minds to learn, or for our palms to hold. Learning the fact will allow you a better understanding of life for you’ll see the time will pass, as you move on and even as you stay engrossed with it. You won’t realize it half of the time while it unfolds either. The concept reigns over our own ignorance.
As you live, hold onto the memories, not the experiences. Remember them and keep them close, because you will forget it all just as soon. You’ll always remember how you felt, but very little of what happened. Time will go by fast. It will feel slow some days, but the next morning you’ll look and see how old you’ve grown. Your decisions will be all yours, maybe they already are, but in the near time the weight will all fall back solely on you. A burden. But, you’ll learn to move forward at your own pace. It will be a privilege. It will feel redundant. You’ll be doing the same things over and over and over, and break. Eventually, you’ll reach a point where you feel more lost and scared. This is the time for adulthood. The stories you write and hear will all tie back and intertwine at an intersection, but it will be one to resist all sense. Frankly, it’s all awfully contradictory— yet one cannot exist without its complexity. So, you’ll be left to accept it and make your own interpretation as to how to make it work. You’ll only get to live in it when time allows it. Learn to stay grounded.
So, while in about half a year I’ll have graduated, and in a few years I’ll be living on my own, I am still here now. I can still fall back and rely on my mother and allow myself to be childish. In such, I still have the privilege of not being burdened by solitude. Simply, it’s not worth crying over just yet. Besides, It’s pretty early to be grieving something that lives on. Graduating won’t age me by a lot. Hopefully my gray hairs won’t grow in for another decade, but if they do, it will be okay.
Growing old is anticlimactic and it will suck sometimes. It’s an anticipatory process with promises of destruction that will wear you down, but when you’re ready you’ll see there’s more. You’ll notice how big the world is. And, because you are too tiny to ever keep it in a palm, you will realize that you can only let it take you wherever it may.
