When I was younger, like preschool younger, my preschool friends and I were playing the family game. Our family game was played by girls, so we all played sisters- so we played Little Women. Before starting the game, we all had to come up with a background for who we were in our pretend family and I remember in games like this, you always wanted to be the oldest. So when it came to deciding my age I said twenty. In response one of my friends said, "Ew! That is so old you know. Like really old." So I changed my make-believe age to fourteen.
Now that my actual age is almost twenty, I can't make myself believe that I could turn twenty. In addition to choosing pretend ages that were too old, when I was younger I always thought that my death was eventual. I didn't understand that we were all dying and would die, but for some reason, I could never picture myself growing up- I had high hopes for my existence. The summer before my first year of middle school I remember thinking that something was going to happen to me. I would constantly be looking left and right before and as I crossed the street. I made sure to say "onion" every time I walked over a sewer grate. I was batting down the hatches. I honestly thought I was going to die that summer because I could not picture myself as a middle schooler. But this blog is proof that my elementary superstitions did not come to pass. I am alive and almost twenty- I am almost 'really old.'
Even now I think twenty is old, I just removed the 'really.' Regardless, I still feel seventeen, and can't internalize that people who are in their early 20s are my age- "my people." Twenty feels like an ax murderer who is on their way to chase me down and cut off my teendom. At his rate, I'll soon be too old to date Leonardo DiCaprio.
But twenty is just a number... a larger, older number. A number that marks that a person has had two decades of life experience. You'd think that would actually mean something. But I've found that some of "my people" who have earned that two-decade mark and even the three-decade mark all seem to be in the same boat as I am. Not knowing what is next, what to do, who they are, or even how to feel twenty.
I'd recently read Elif Batuman's book, The Idiot, which is a semi-autobiographical novel about a girl's first year of college. I thought it'd be an appropriate end-of-semester-two read. While I did not attend Harvard, take Russian classes, or fall in love with a Hungarian senior, I found the book very relatable. I am an idiot- a nineteen-year-old idiot who is destined to turn twenty in October. What I'm getting at is that like the book's protagonist, Selin, I'm learning to let go of having to know everything. To have a plan, to listen to what others think I should do, but instead to learn to consider what I think and work towards what I truly want- even if, at the moment, I don't know exactly what that is. Not knowing is normal and you may feel nineteen- lost, confused, scared of rejection and the unknown- for a long time.
"...nineteen still felt old and somehow alien to who I was. It occurred to me that it might take more than a year-maybe as many as seven years-to learn to feel nineteen." -Elif Batuman, The Idiot.
Seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, or twenty...They are all just numbers. While I think that twenty is "so old," I also think about how twenty is only about one-quarter of life. I thought nineteen years was a long time- I didn't even think I'd make it to twelve- but the average eighty years seems like an eternity. But that is more than enough time to feel nineteen, let alone accept twenty.
Idiot or not, I'll be twenty in five months. And as a twenty-year-old idiot, I may still feel seventeen but I will be okay.
I mean, I guess it is better to feel younger than to feel older.
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