Unlike most teenagers however, I find myself looking at my birthday with a little sadness and apprehension. So much is expected of us eighteen year-olds in the adult world… So many standards have been set for the things I am supposed to have accomplished, the challenges I am supposed to have faced, the degrees and accreditation I am supposed to have earned. Why so much pressure on living? Why does everyone I meet find it imperative to know where I’m going to college, if I am driving, if I am working, when I finish high school, if I have a boyfriend; what exactly the blueprint for my future looks like? I don’t understand why They feel like They have a right to critique my choices as a neo-adult, just because I seem to have survived another 365 days on this planet we call Earth. From whence springs this attitude?
Funnily enough, I display the same attitude towards other eighteen-year olds… “What are you going to do with your life? That? Oh, that’s… interesting…” - while the script in my thought bubble is running something like this… “What an idiot. He/she will never get anywhere in life.” Then again, where exactly are all us teens supposed to be “going” in life anyway? The Ivies?
This mentality, this emphasis on SAT scores and diplomas and degrees and GPAs and titles, is undoubtedly not an exclusively American attitude, but it seems to seriously pervade American culture and living more than any other nation’s. I never noticed it before high school, but as soon as my freshman year began, I started to hear and perceive this attitude everywhere, even, eventually, in myself. Americans really are obsessed with the idea of legitimacy – whether you can prove “it” by official-looking papers or sheets of numbers doesn’t matter, as long as you can prove “it.” One of my favorite movies, Catch Me If You Can, makes much fun of this attitude – its famous and appropriate phrase is, “looking at the pinstripes”… Do we not all look at the pinstripes, the letters after the name, the biographies, the test results, the uniform… just a little too hard, while excluding the important things - the conversation, the personality, the good deeds, the speech…? As I reflect on turning eighteen, I become conscious of this exclusion more than ever.
These pinstripers believe, not so much that you are what you have done, but that you are the hoop through which you have jumped, like a circus dog or something. These pinstripers can be partially excused for this mentality for two reasons – a), in some cases, there really is no way of measuring a person’s ability and intelligence from a distance unless they pass a certain standardized test that will give the tester some idea as to what the testee is capable of: and b) because, to a certain extent, tests such as the SAT, or college degrees such as the master’s, do prove that you have worked hard to do well and obtain a certain legitimacy. But in many ways They have taken this rationale too far… as have many of us. I believe firmly that institutions such as public school have only exacerbated the shallowness and rigidity of this approach.
It isn’t only outside pressure that causes me apprehension about my maturing age… It is the realization of how time marches on and we are powerless to stop, or to even slow, its winding course. I realize of course that I have my entire life in front of me and that it’s pointless to moan about having one foot in the grave when I’m only eighteen. But it is good for us, whether we are eight years old or eighty, to occasionally stop and contemplate the futility and terminality of this play we call Life, on this stage we call World, in which, as Shakespeare famously put it, we are but actors. Looking back upon my first act, I realize that I have some regrets, along with a bit of wistfulness – after all, I can never get that time back, and that is somewhat a depressing thought.
When I think about being older, sometimes it frightens me. This is because it seems as though an older “me” won’t really be “me” at all – that in reality I am who I am now, and when I become an old woman, it will be like I am disguised as someone I’m not. This idea of course, like all fear, is illogical. Though I was Anna when I was eight, I am still Anna ten years later, and I will still be Anna when I am twenty-eight, no matter how much my persona has altered. If our powerlessness to halt Time is a problem, the solution is to make the most of the Time we do have, and to “let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change.” Is that not all we can do?
So, I conclude these musings with excitement, for eighteen is an exciting age, on the brink of the real adult world, full of promise and uncertainties and hopeful dreams. My personality is virtually formed. Hopefully I possess that common sense which is, according the Einstein, “the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen."And to put this excitement into yet another quote, this one by my favorite poet….
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