growing into knowing
some things, only time can teach us. others, i'm still too young to know.
I couldn’t tell you when it happened, but the memory of it is still resoundingly clear in my mind. I’m scrolling on Instagram and I come across a reel—political in nature, of course—and I’m immediately irked by the creator’s black and white thinking and complete lack of nuance. I click on the creator’s profile. They’re 19 years old. Ah, I think, that explains it then. I chuckle, I roll my eyes, and I move on, having totally disregarded everything I’d just seen and heard. Later, it’ll occur to me that I had done what younger version of myself swore I’d never do: I completely wrote off a young person simply because they were young.
When I was in my late teens and early 20s, I hated when people brushed me off because of my age and I resented the fact that people thought I couldn’t possibly know anything because I hadn’t been alive for as long as they have. Now that I’m in my early 30s, I’d like to think I’m still young enough to understand the young adults’ plight but old enough to understand how much I didn’t know back then. Still, even if for only a moment, I’d become the type of older adult that I’d once resented.
As an adolescent, and even as a young adult, it’s almost expected that your thoughts and opinions will be treated like silly little whims by people older than you. “You’ll get it when you’re older,” they’d say. “You’re too young to understand.” I think most of us have felt the frustration of being written off like that, so why do so many of us become that kind of older adult? Is it because we’ve forgotten what that feels like? Is it because those sentiments turned out to be true, despite how much our younger selves didn’t want to believe it?
A few weeks ago, I came across this note on my feed:
Upon reading it, I was simultaneously in agreement with its author and absolutely flabbergasted by the realization that I’m apparently old enough to agree with such a sentiment.
I, too, was one of those young adults once. I started a blog when I was 22 years old. I was 2 years out of college and totally at a loss for what to do with my life. There was nothing else for me to do but write, so that’s what I did. I wrote to figure out what I was feeling. I wrote to make sense of it all. And when I moved across the country later that year, I used my blog to document my experiences and share everything I learned along the way.
That blog fizzled out in my mid-20s, in part thanks to the pandemic, but also because I’d become much more settled by that point of my life. Sure, there were still plenty of things I’d yet to experience for the first time, but by that point, I’d checked quite a few of them off the list. Eventually, you reach a point where the shininess and newness of everything wears off, and life just feels like a thing you do every day.
When I read these essays by 23-year-olds experiencing things for the very first time, I’m reminded of my own fledgling adulthood—when everything was new and confusing and unfamiliar; when even the most seemingly mundane realizations felt wildly profound. Sometimes, I read these essays and I envy them. Not for living through such a defining period of their lives in a post-pandemic world—I sure as hell don’t envy them for that—but because they have all the time in the world to figure their shit out and they don’t even know it!
Despite their lack of lived experience, there’s a lot we can learn from younger adults. What they lack in experience, they make up for in audacity and boldness, qualities that we sometimes forget how to tap into as we grow older. They also tend to see things in ways that we don’t, in part because their brains are still rapidly developing, but also because of the events and the culture that colored their formative years.
That said, as I grow older, I’m becoming increasingly aware of the fact that there truly are things that only time and experience can teach us. Now, I can’t help but marvel at how little I knew when I was 23. I was so certain about things that never came to pass, but simultaneously so uncertain about my own sense of self. I was impulsive and wildly idealistic and made a lot of questionable decisions. I’d look back at my teenage self and laugh about how she didn’t have a clue, and I did so without the knowledge that a future version of myself would one day do the same.
Even so, I wouldn’t change a thing. After all, it’s the job of a fledgling adult to believe they have all the answers while remaining blissfully unaware of how young they still are. They’re supposed to be brash and bold, making decisions without fully considering the consequences and agonize over running out of time despite their having plenty of it. As for the rest of us—the more seasoned adults, if you will—it’s our job to look at those gorgeous young people in awe and wonder as they carve out a place for themselves in the world; to quietly watch over them while they figure it all out.
I hope that as I continue my unceasing march through life, I don’t forget how it all felt—the freedom and the agony of my early 20s, the exploration and the confusion of my mid-to-late 20s, the puzzling in-betweenness of my early 30s. I hope that in my encounters with people younger than me, I consider their age as context rather than a reason for outright dismissal.
I’m only 32 years old, so I have to assume that there’s still a lot that I still don’t know. But I do know this: in the same way that I’m marveling at my 23-year-old self, which is the same way that she marveled at my teenage self, a 45-year-old version of me will be doing the exact same thing to the me of now.
Oh, what a beautiful cycle it is.
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