When most people remember childhood birthday parties, they remember things like tearing through endless wrapping paper, pleading over who would get the icing roses from the cake, and rubbing balloons on their heads to generate static and make them stick to the wall. For me, one birthday experience stands out in my mind as just as memorable as getting my Vanilla Ice tape at age fourteen.
At my tenth birthday party, Uncle Bruce leaned over and whispered in my ear something I have never forgotten: "Once you hit the double digits, kid," he said, "there's no turning back." I laughed and started to skip away when suddenly I felt the burden of that extra digit. Why, ten has the same number of digits as seventy! My fourth grade mind was consumed with the thought that I was barreling toward old age.
Without the restriction of having to remain journalistically unbiased, columnists often end up writing about their own everyday thoughts and experiences, putting on paper what goes through their heads. Right now, I am grimly focused on the fact that I am two days away from parachuting out of the metaphorical airplane of the teenage years. In plain English, I'm turning twenty.
The all-consuming dread I feel about approaching January 19, 1997 fills my thoughts hourly. It was clear to me that this week's column could discuss no other subject. And with that realization came the memory of Rachel Gilliar's column "Life After the Teenage Years" [January 17, 1996, The Dartmouth] published exactly one year ago today in which she rationalizes her own anxiety over the big two-zero. Her column had a dual message. First, she concluded that with age came a wine-like refinement to be welcomed rather than dreaded, and second, that birthday cards and blitzes would be heartily welcomed. (HB 4370 for all interested. Thanks.)
What struck me about voicing my anxiety over age twenty is that it's all been said before. My experience is not the least bit special. Everyone who lives for 7,305 days will inevitably turn twenty. To passionately describe my personal fear of aging would be imbuing my column with a false sense of self-importance. Yet it does not abate my anxiety to realize that everyone goes through this.
Instead, Gilliar's column made me realize that in the search for ourselves, there is an undeniable universality of experience. Many things we find to be momentous personal discoveries are truly the links that make us similar. Remember your freshman fascination with blitzmail? You measured your popularity in black new message dots. You blitzed yourself just to hear the noise. You couldn't believe other campuses actually function without blitz. Before you got your computers, the upperclassmen and D. Randall Spydell, the computer orientation guy, told you the mania would happen. But even after being prepared for the shock of your newfound communication outlet, you went through the range of emotions anyway.
In much the same way, I've known all my life that in the winter of 1997 I would turn twenty, and I've heard other nascent twenty-somethings describe the experience, but it wasn't until it happened to me that it meant anything significant. I have fewer career plans than you'll find pork products in a kosher kitchen, and I hear the stories of interview-hassled, frustrated, clueless '97s, but from the sophomore vantage point, I can't internalize that feeling into any tangible apprehension. I can't share Sander Schlichter's Commencement anxiety ["This Week at the Hop: Commencement," Jan. 13, 1997, The Dartmouth] because even though I understand what he is saying, I'm simply not at that stage of life yet.
Going through struggles, both concrete and emotional, is what maturity is all about. Experiencing and dealing with the quintessential landmark life events, like turning twenty, and learning from them is a far better measurement of personal growth than adding one year to your age by numbly passing from January 18 to January 20.
My dissertation presented, I feel no less fear about my upcoming birthday, yet I realize that for this or any roadblock, there is always someone to turn to with your anxiety because there will always be someone who has experienced the same thing. And I mean that not simply as propaganda for counseling services, but as an encouragement to talk about the things that bother you. It need not be in such a public forum as an opinion column, but as interesting as it is to discover the differences between us, it can be just as rewarding to find out that you are not alone.
