musings on turning 20
Image Description: Christine “Lady Bird” McPherson from the 2017 film Lady Bird sits in bed, staring down at a cupcake with a candle burning in it. Behind her: a cluttered room, with a poster that reads “Vote Lady Bird,” a dress hanging on the wall, and a messy open closet.
Tomorrow, I’m turning twenty years old. I’m half expecting it to be like those movies where you turn a certain age and disappear. At 11:59pm tonight, I’ll likely be clutching my bed sheets tightly, watching my life flash before my eyes, feeling a wave of nausea bubble up in my chest and as the clock strikes midnight I’ll just – vanish.
Because twenty is too old, far too old. My eight year old self imagined – no, revered – the teenagers of my life. My cousins who sat gossiping on couches, sneaking shots of liquor and discussing boys and sex and love. That was as old as old got. My parents and aunts and uncles were separate creatures born with children. Life didn’t exist past nineteen.
But here it is —in one day, I’ll be living beyond the days of my youth, the slow swell of a tide I thought would never recede. I’m getting older, but my favorite genre is coming-of-age. What happens when the coming-of-age has…. arrived?
I think I’m suffering from a bout of what I’ve seen to be common in my generation. Preemptive nostalgia. I feel sad over things that haven’t happened yet, memories I have yet to form, kids I have yet to have, loves I have yet to lose. Everything in my life has become romanticized; I refuse to delete old alarms because they hold memories like waking up for the airport, or senior sunrise. I keep receipts from late-night CVS runs and hold onto perfume bottles I refuse to throw away because their scent reminds me of “spring 2021!” My Spotify is filled with March of 2022 and summer of 2020 and reminders of how shit my music used to be but it’s all a part of the memory.
Adding to my illness of preemptive nostalgia is the fact that whenever I scroll on TikTok, I’m bombarded with sad edits to ethereal images and montages of coming-of-age movies to a background of “I know these will all be moments someday…” from The Perks of Being a Wallflower. Sometimes, it gets me in my feels. I’m like: wow. This is what it’s all about. I really do only live once. And I’m grateful – my generation has been blessed with the gift of documentation. Nothing can ever be forgotten when half of our lives are lived online. And, sometimes, I can look back on the stack of alarms I have collected in my phone or listen to old Spotify playlists and cry at the feeling of once being sixteen.
Mostly though, it’s all really fucking annoying.
The urge to document and remember everything has filled me with a disdain for myself every time I reach for my phone camera or my notes app or my Spotify to make “songs that feel like 2 am on March 22 when you’re at the boba shop in your hometown with your hometown friends after experiencing the second to last day of your high school and skipped down the boulevard you walked so many times.” I document everything because I feel like every moment is gone before I’ve experienced it. It’s the illness of our generation. It’s the reason why I’m so afraid to turn 20. Every second of my conscious, waking, teenage life, I was reminded that every moment is precious and you only live once. Remember it all. Don’t forget 16 when you turn 17. Because time moves so fast in our current day and age, the chance to embrace time has become far from effortless. The seconds of your day can only be perceived with mindfulness and the 54231 rule and counting how many times you can see the color green. And while mindfulness and being nostalgic and collecting memories are wonderful things, these day-to-day pressures also remind us that the passage of time is something to dread. Past the age of eighteen, a birthday is another reminder of how much younger you aren’t getting. Being seventeen and aimless is just like an edit in a teen movie; being twenty and aimless is hell. I don’t even know who I am anymore.
So…. I’m dreading turning 20. It means saying goodbye to the days when I could relate to high school movies, or songs about teenage love. I am crossing over into a new age of my life where every second counts because every minute that I lose, my “peak” is fading. When I was a kid, teenagers were the stuff of dreams. As soon as I crossed the threshold into thirteen, documenting everything was all I ever thought about. But documenting didn’t save anything. Being mindful is futile when everything becomes a memory anyway. As a kid, I couldn’t envision life past nineteen, but tomorrow, I’ll be turning twenty. Fading away from the eternity of youth, the kingdom of high school, the qualms of the teenage mind. Maybe it’d be better if I did disappear at the stroke of midnight. Wouldn’t that be better? If we all stayed young forever?
