Just under the shell of adulthood

When I was six, my classmates tormented me for looking like a "Chink" and having a "lollipop head." One evening I tiptoed barefoot across the kitchen floor in my Pound Puppies nightgown and slowly removed the scissors, the ones too sharp for homework, from the drawer. Staring at my reflection in the microwave, I proceeded to cut my hair with grave, deliberate snips. The less Asian hair, the better. My mother found me, the clipped locks covering my neck and my shoulders and my feet, and shrieked. With hair shorn outrageously close to the scalp, I returned to school as the incarnation of every doll's nightmare.

Although many idealize childhood as a period of unperturbed serenity, innocence, and joy, I have always placed my greatest hopes on adulthood. Magically, on my sixteenth or eighteenth or twenty-first birthday, I would blossom into whoever I wanted to be, freed from my childish vulnerabilities forever. This fantasy wavered when I realized that my parents ("Real Grownups") were themselves not immune to insecurity and self-doubt, and then collapsed as my birthdays, instead of transforming me into the Queen of Cool, merely increased my ability to appear "put together."

Adults like to observe — scornfully, sentimentally — at how the young feel immortal, extraordinary, untouchable. With a higher inclination for entertaining those feelings, however, comes a higher likelihood for admitting when they falter. The young are more likely to show frustration, fear, anger, disappointment, and insecurity whereas their adult counterparts, less prone to feel like superheroes, feel more pressured to project an image of perfection ad infinitum. We are a never-ending self-advertisement, the alwaysglowing projection of success, the embodiment of that resume we rewrote 15 times. Or we feel we should be.

On the outside, we have never been more alike. "Appropriate" speech, actions and manners have been ingrained in us, and we've acquired that vacuous, polite smile that masks a thousand different inward thoughts. Somehow, we're supposed to gain both heightened self-confidence and a keener awareness of our limitations. We're supposed to have both the comfort of being ourselves and the discernment to recognize how and why we are being judged, which stereotypes and expectations others impose onto us, and what we represent, whether we like it or not. We're supposed to shed our self-consciousness while over the years accruing numerous labels that we can never fully scrape off.

I don't miss my childhood for its imagined idyllic joys. I miss how adults treated me as a person, not a laundry list of abilities and achievements. Instead of subjecting them to critical, expectant gazes, we view children with tenderness. We give them the benefit of the doubt. We forgive their confusions and mistakes. Children haven't led businesses, written legislation, invented gadgets, discovered medicine, revolutionized industries, saved lives, or scored in the 99th percentile of anything. They don't have eye-popping resumes or well-conceived opinions, and they can offer us very little. And despite all this, we cherish them as they are.

As our lives reach a frenetic pitch of hyper-conscious self-projection, as we scramble for accolades and scurry up various career ladders, I suggest that we grant our family and friends the warm, forgiving acceptance we normally reserve for children. Other people cannot be evaluated with a cost-benefit analysis, bullet points cannot measure their worth, and a thesis could not begin to capture the nuances of their minds.

Gwendolyn Brooks wrote that "the trouble with grownups was that under the / magnificent shell of adulthood, just under, /Waited the baby full of tantrums." How long can we crouch under that shell before we suffocate?

I think we all have funny-in-retrospect stories about our pained, confused, insecure younger selves. But we haven't changed much. We weren't invincible then, and despite our accrued years, inches and degrees, we aren't invincible now. We may be poised Princetonians about to step out into the real world with our adult clothes and our adult tastes, but in some sense, we're still standing in our Pound Puppies nightgowns, clumsily snipping our own hair. Julie Park is an English major from Wayne, N.J. She can be reached at jypark@princeton.edu.