I know I’ve been relatively silent(for me at least) in this past week and for those that care, I’m doing fine I just decided to take a week to myself to do some entirely normal things: watch TV shows and the occasional movie, play video games, and hang out with friends as opposed to constantly trying to doing something career related(It taxes the mind,body, and soul very quickly) and now I would like to think that I’m back in a better mental state, although the pressures of everything I would like to do still weigh heavy upon my mind.
As is usually the case when I’m not engrossing myself in my various passions, I tend to do a lot of personal observation and reflection which always tethers on being a good or bad experience depending on what my observations and reflections are about. Between the ten year anniversary of 9/11 and one of my closest friends leaving over the weekend, I did a lot of reflecting on my younger days and how much things have changed since then.
It’s not a secret that kids are generally protected from a lot of the harsh realities of life, in fact it would seem like a greater effort is being put on not having kids experience these realities even during more crucial developmental periods of life, which is terrible to think about since, in my opinion, there are few ‘child types’ worse than the overly sheltered kid.
There’s also a lot of things about life that kids unknowingly attempt to protect themselves from, usually not aware that they’re doing so until something in life sharply contrasts what they’d previously believed in. I know for me when I was growing up I didn’t believe that my grandparents could possibly get any older, much less die, My parents would never have grey hair, and my friends would never leave me. Fast forward about a decade plus and I only have one remaining grandparent, I’ve peeped the hair coloring products in the bathroom cabinet, and two of my closest friends no longer live in the same state, one not even in the same country.
Some of this reflection conversation came up yesterday at the dinner table and like my mom said, “Where has the time gone??”
I say this a lot in my everyday conversation and I will probably say this until it is actual fact but I feel old, obviously not in a literal sense(though with some of these newer body aches and problems with memory I wonder) but in the sense that I feel like the anticipation that I had about being a young adult compared to the realities of being a young adult are almost complete opposites. I understand that what is anticipated rarely, if ever, goes as imagined but a lot of the alterations were a result of a change in the times then anything else.
I know I wanted to do a lot of traveling with my friends, and though technically I still can, with the economy looking the way it is and most(maybe all?) of my friends playing the hand life’s dealt them at the moment( school, careers, marriage, and kids) I’m not sure when or if that’s even a possibility. Not to mention I still haven’t been able to find a steady job…
It’s kind of crazy though that the things I considered to be trivial back in the day(i.e. school, careers, marriage, and kids lol) would play such a crucial part in reshaping life as I knew it. Of course when I was younger I didn’t consider that some of my friends would move away or that we’d fall out of contact due to the business of our individual lives, or that some of them wanted to be married at this stage in their life, or that others would even have kids and yet that’s reality.
Looking at it from another angle though, it makes sense. Even though I barely made it into the era, I am a(VERY LATE) 80’s baby who was raised in the 90’s. I wasn’t old enough to truly witness/remember the changes that the 90’s brought, but anybody who takes a half hearted look into history can confirm that the some of the developments in the 90’s revolutionized the way the world is today. The way people think, act, and respond nowadays are entirely different now then how it was when I was growing up and I’m technically still a part of this technology infused generation.
So while on one hand it’s difficult for me to understand why one of my friends is getting married at age 22/23(marriage at a younger age is almost unthinkable in the mind of someone from today’s generation) I realize that my mom had already been married and had me at that same age and that I was raised in an era where getting married/having kids at that age was just starting to become an ideal of the past.
With that in mind, maybe it’s time I start becoming that adult that goes to a pool party strictly to socialize as opposed to swimming and socializing, or start investing my money in buying more button up shirts, slacks and suits as opposed to polos, jean shorts and nikes…Nahh.. Not yet. I’ve still got my youth.
