I don't want to grow up.
After a night of book-club debates and several vigorous games of spades - read as: but not really - a group of friends and I did what every college kid with the Sunday morning blues does: a mandatory trip to Bodo's. While sipping a chocolate milk box with a straw, one of my friends turned to the group and said, "Well, I guess it's time for me to find my own doctor, dentist and all that in Charlottesville now that I'm about to be a real adult. I suppose I can't justify making a two-hour trip home just to get my teeth cleaned and checked. Not anymore - you know, being an adult is hard." And it is.
I like to imagine that she proceeded to blow oversized, chocolatey milk bubbles - the Sam's Club-esque ones only milk is capable of producing. But I have a hunch that she didn't. She was too seized by the plague of growing up.
We live both elated and terrified by graduation, by an exodus that feels less like freedom and more like chaos or resignation to some people. We all too often want the best of both worlds: the freedom of living outside of our parents' home, without the burden of bills and fiscal independence. Life, liberty and the pursuit of Mom and Dad's bank account.
We've caught it: Peter Pan Syndrome. And it spreads as quickly as 12-year-old boys in tights can fly.
This phenomenon looks different for different people. For me, it does not look like never wanting to grow up. It looks more like wanting to feel young when I should.
Ask any of my friends. They'll tell you I am "an old lady." I am 21.
I spend hours a day bemoaning the fact that I would go to bed immediately after dinner if it were socially acceptable, that my idea of an invigorating day is one in which I have time to organize my wallet and vacuum the rug, that I wore two layers of wool out to bars this weekend to stay warm. The high for the day was 59, which was conveniently also my age at birth.
I talk with my friends about how the virtual has made us both insatiable and prosaic, how the world isn't black and white but we partition it that way, how etymology proves that every word probably started out as the same formless mass of thought and the word "bulbous" is really gross, how my dreams are incongruent with life and only become terrifying when you can't tell the difference and how beavers make unfavorable house-pets because they deconstruct and rearrange your furniture over night.
I also talk to some of my friends about important things, such as, "Why do we have to grow up?"
Truthfully, I might have grown up before my time. Here I sit, dreaming of perpetual girlhood and the 90s, back when I viewed the world through sepia-toned glasses, back when people were basically good at heart and when my biggest dilemma in life was "Hmmm, NSYNC or Backstreet Boys? Or pretend that I'm too progressive and ahead of my time for mainstream pop bands?" Oh, to be young again.
When confronted with the task of managing our own finances, entering our own insurance plans independent of our father's or mother's job, doing our own taxes and otherwise "growing up," the tendency to look on youth and childhood as mythic is nearly unavoidable.
It's not that being an independent adult is a bad thing; in fact, some of us have been living in this role for many years prior to college graduation. There comes a point when independence is admirable and necessary. Growing up is compulsory and good. It's just difficult to make sure we don't let our adult kill our inner child.
Perhaps it is a tragic thing to have to "grow up," yet perhaps more tragic is to be twice as old as your body.
Yes, I think it is best to have a grown-up mind and a childlike spirit, not the kind that emanates forth naivety and disillusionment, but the kind that softens the soul and believes that people are good and life is eternally beautiful, maybe even pure.
The kind of adult who calls home to Mom and Dad for advice rather than for a check, who knows how to manage a personal budget and how to defeat the final boss in Zelda: Ocarina of Time. That's the kind of growing up I believe we should strive for.
I don't want to grow up. But I already have.
Kathleen's column runs biweekly Mondays. She can be reached at k.baines@cavalierdaily.com.
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