Officially an Adult…Sorta (Aleiyah Aguero)

A few weeks ago, I celebrated my 21st birthday. While I expected to spend my day looking back to the past and commemorating how far I’ve come, I found myself anxiously looking towards the future and the new position that I would hold in society. I won’t say that I didn’t enjoy my birthday, because I certainly did, but I did not expect to be overcome with such a sudden wave of bittersweetness. While I sat on the train that morning, heading towards school, I thought about how I was now the age that my mother was when she had me, triggering a wrenching feeling in my gut. While I definitely do not want to be a mother at this point in my life, it is so surreal to recognize that my mother had me at this age, especially in thinking about how small I still feel. 21 is an age to celebrate, but I still feel like a kid in some ways, and to think that my mother had celebrated her 21st birthday as a mother has completely altered the way I now look back on my childhood. On that train ride, I finally realized what Mitski meant in her song “First Love/Late Spring,” when she notes that she feels like “a tall child--” I somehow feel less of an adult than I did at 15.

Life comes at you quickly, and so do responsibilities. There are countless tasks that you suddenly have to sift through, not even once you turn 21, but once you turn 18. You are expected to automatically know what you want to do in life, to have your career aspirations laid out, and to move out of your parents’ house and support yourself financially…all at the same time. I had dealt with all of these things around the time when I turned 18, so 21 was not as jolting. However, 21 does serve as a milestone and a checkpoint in which I find myself looking back at my life, to my childhood, and feeling terrified at the fact that I am an adult now. It feels like just yesterday, I was 11 doing cartwheels in my backyard and rolling around in the mud. Now I am supposed to know what a 401K is? When did that happen?

Today, I went to a doctor’s appointment on my own. I had to figure out a way to get all the way from downtown to the suburbs within a span of two hours. I have been doing this on my own since I was 18, but for some reason, this time felt different. Everything was colored with nostalgia and reminiscence. On the train, I thought about how I used to hold my mom’s hand and hide under chairs when I was scared of getting a shot during my yearly check-up. Now, I walk in and walk out, paying my copay and scheduling my own appointments, then moving on to the next errand of the day. I had to make the phone call to my insurance company myself when asking about my benefits, not my mom. This may sound self-explanatory and silly, but when I look back to only 3 or 4 years ago, I recall my mom scheduling my appointments and driving me to them, talking to the receptionist and so forth. It is hard to pinpoint exactly when you become an adult, but I know I am one now, and it is all so surreal.

If you’re dealing with a similar existential crisis to mine, regardless of your age or the place you’re at in life, you are not alone. Everyone may be at various stages, and with that, different experiences and wisdom, but it is still all of our first times on Earth, and we are experiencing the ages that we are now for the first time. This is all a very scary, sudden reality that we are living in. And even though life does come at you fast, and it is easy to forget just how wild it is that we are existing on a chunk of rock in a vast expanse of emptiness, I still find it important to take a step back and think about the world at large, and the places we hold in it. This may sound dramatic and esoteric, but when you consider how we each only have one life, every advancing year and milestone achieved is both exciting and terrifying.

After turning 21, I spoke to some older acquaintances and colleagues of mine about how bizarre it is to have hit this age. I told them about how, the way I look at it, I’ll be 30 in 9 years already, when it feels like I was learning how to ride a bike with my mom just yesterday. While my peers found this funny, and thought about where they were in their lives at 30, it is still a very valid feeling to have. We are all aging, and with it, new expectations arise. This is a normal thing to freak out about--you don’t have to be at the mid-life crisis stage to consider your place in this world, and to look to both the past and future with anxious anticipation. While it is important to avoid falling into a debilitating cycle of forward thinking, it is crucial to recognize that everyone ages, and that most experience anxiety about aging.

When I look back, I think about how far away my childhood seems to be. I don’t remember exactly when I went from going to the doctor’s with my mom to going on my own and suddenly filling out all of the paperwork and paying the bills. I don’t remember exactly when I made the shift in my mind into adulthood, or if I ever did, prior to my 21st birthday. Obviously, I knew I was a legal adult, but your later teen years are a strange liminal space between childhood and adulthood, being treated like a child but having adult expectations thrust upon you. At 21, though, you’re an adult. You can buy your own alcohol, enter age-restricted events, and so forth, all things that felt lightyears away from me at 18. And yet, here I am. Standing in an Acme, buying my first alcoholic drink. All of this is so strange, and I am tired of people acting like they have it all figured out. Becoming an adult is weird and awkward and scary. But, coming from someone making this transition myself, it is also so liberating and exciting, even if I feel like I am doing things wrong or that I don’t have my life figured out yet. And honestly, the truth is, no one does. Regardless of age.

This blog may seem a bit erratic, but that is purposeful--transitioning into adulthood when you still feel so small is incredibly bizarre. There is no guidebook on how to deal with this drastic change, from high school, to college, to the workforce and beyond. All of this to say, don’t let anyone make you feel like you have to pretend to have everything together, and that this isn’t an overwhelming experience. Aging is strange, especially when moving from childhood to adulthood, and we have every right to reminisce on our responsibility-free youth while simultaneously looking excitedly towards the future. I may not have perfect advice on handling this struggle, because I am currently in the midst of it myself, but that is the point of this blog--there is no all-encompassing advice when it comes to adulthood, and growing up in general. Everyone’s experience is unique, but we are all united in forging our way into the adult sphere, one step at a time.