As I blew out the waxy rainbow candles of my Lou’s birthday cake two weeks ago, I have to admit that I didn’t feel all that different. I was one year older — and no longer a teenager — but still surrounded by the same friends, in the same dorm room, with the same ideas and aspirations. Being twenty felt … ordinary.
A few weeks earlier, I would’ve scoffed at someone in their twenties claiming they still felt like a teenager. I’d scroll past people on TikTok calling themselves “25-year-old teenagers” and roll my eyes. It was bizarre to me that someone would want to associate themselves with the same crowd of people who went to high school every day, worked at fast food restaurants on the weekends and did homework into the early hours of the morning.
But now, as I quietly exit that reality and stumble into this new one, I think I might get it.
Lying in my bed that night after a long day of birthday festivities, I wondered why so many of us feel suspended between youth and adulthood. Maybe it’s not the high school halls we miss, but something smaller: the peaceful dependence of adolescence. The sound of pans clattering in the kitchen as your mom makes dinner. The ease and familiarity of friends you’ve known for all your life. The simplicity of the world when all you have seen with your own two eyes is within an hour-long car ride.
I first felt that comfort slip away at eighteen, when I boarded a plane to Dartmouth for the first time and watched my home shrink into the clouds. In my uncertainty, I got my first taste of the long decade that is your twenties. In this in-between space of early adulthood, I feel both too young and too old, too uncertain and somehow too aware. It’s a decade of contradictions: everything happening at once, and nothing happening quite yet.
I have ten years to figure out my twenties, which really is a lot of time. Yet I still feel the pressure of growing up when I ask myself: Who will I be? What will I do? When will I get there?
If I, like many others, one day find myself wishing to be nineteen again, I hope I also remember the quiet wonder of growing up, of moving forward without feeling rushed. There is room to grow and still be growing. Room to look back, and also ahead. There is comfort in these in-betweens.
This week in Mirror, we sit with the feeling of becoming — that strange, tender space between who we’ve been and who we’re still learning to be. One writer ranks the nostalgic combination of a blueberry muffin and black coffee from restaurants around town. A second writer explores nature beyond Hanover in a visit to the Vermont Institute of Natural Science. Another writer reflects on her experience meditating at Rollins Chapel and the calm that a few minutes of peace brings to a busy college student. A fourth writer sits down with the three Dartmouth recipients of the Guggenheim Fellowship as they discuss their current projects. Finally, two writers discuss the difficulties of long distance relationships.
Happy Week 7, Mirror! This week, settle into the in-between. Hold on to what makes you feel grounded, but don’t be so afraid of the unknown that you always find yourself looking backwards. There is joy in not knowing what’s next, too.
