Watching my little brother pack his belongings into the car before his freshman year of college as I did the same on the cusp of my senior year, I felt old. That first day at Princeton seemed like whole lifetimes ago. In the years between then and now, my perception of myself and the world, and my place in that world, had changed tremendously and constantly. And now, here I was, the pseudo-responsible adult, telling my brother to be smart and safe, and to make good decisions — the same hollow mantra I’d only half-heard through the haze of my excitement three years earlier. When he texted me that weekend with a simple and yet all encompassing, “I love college,” I realized that, although we both loved our respective universities, my love was tinged with a premature nostalgia, a love of something that already seemed past. I felt old.
I said these words to my friend Anna Gordon of McGill University — a brilliant, profoundly insightful friend I might add — expecting her to agree, as every other rising and graduated senior had done in the past few weeks. Instead, she replied, “But don’t you also feel so young?” Of course, I was well aware that 21 is not actually old, even if I felt so. However, I continued to disagree. There was but one year left before those mystical, long-awaited and quickly-fleeting “best years of our lives” were behind us, and we would never be as fun, reckless or free as we were in this moment, at this age. What an awful thing.
However, Gordon was not so easily brought into the depths of communal despair. Instead, she explained that I was looking at it all wrong. Growing up is a process, not of passing through ages, but of accumulating them. Therefore, to be 21 also means that one is all the ages that came before. We are at once 20 and 16 and 10 and 5. We don’t grow out of an age, shed that number to move onto the next; rather, we amass ages. Consequently, my default age is 21 as defined by society, but that does not mean I can never see those other states again. In this way, 21 is not really that old at all, as the majority of the years we have amassed before it are quite young.
Her theory may not be scientifically correct or even logically perfect, but I think it is the most beautiful way to look at the precarious in-between phase in which I find myself. It guarantees that the future will bring change, new perspectives and evolution certainly, but will also leave me with the choice to be, every once in a while, the 21-year-old I am now.
My foremost worry for the next few years is that real life will erode the wonderful things that I possess in this moment — a sense of wonder, a bit of wanderlust, spontaneity, the ability to take myself less than seriously, pleasure in doing absolutely nothing. As young people, we look at some adults and wonder where along the way they lost these things, and I wonder if I’m destined for the same fate. However, to acquire ages, as my friend describes it, gives one permission to revisit another time and to briefly shed the expectations of his or her current age.
When I ride airplanes, I hold my mom’s hand for good luck as the plane takes off, and, in those moments, I am 5. The dark basement still scares me every so often because I am 8. I dress up with nowhere to go because I am 10. I get butterflies in my stomach when a cute boy looks at me for a moment too long because I am 13. I think I am older than I am and fight with my mom who knows best but whom I cannot admit that to because I am 16. I want to go out, have fun and make stupid decisions because I am 20. I have big dreams because I am 21. That is who I am right now — a conglomerate of every age I’ve been, with nothing truly lost or that far behind me.
And that makes me feel very young.
Chelsea Jones is an English major fromRidgefield, Conn. She can be reached at chelseaj@princeton.edu.
Update: This article has been updated to include the name of Anna Gordon at her request.
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