is waif
INTERN’S CORNER: WHERE IS OUR YOUTH?
16: The number that masquerades as a façade for freedom and youth. Growing up, my favorite media painted with vivid oils the picturesque image and magic of being sixteen. In middle school, I patiently waited for my own sixteenth birthday where I believed my life would magically transform to a John Green novel. I imagined myself falling in love with strangers, traveling the country with my friends, and all the other age- associated adventures that had been sold to me. Now, as I take the final lap of my teenagehood and inch closer to my twenties, I still look back on being sixteen with a tender fondness -- adding fairy lights and a magic hue to events that were just as mundane as my fifteenth year. Why do I think back on sixteen of any of my nine other teenage years as the epitome of my youth?
It just makes sense: everything about sixteen is the formulaic climax of youth. It’s the year I could get my license and no longer have to wait for my mom to pick me up from rehearsals or drop me off at my friend’s house. It allowed for a new found mystery and freedom as I would drive in my friend’s 1996 Toyota Camry with no way for anyone to track us or know what we were doing. It felt like an initiation into some cool young adult society the first time my friends and I drove miles away to smoke in some forest. Sixteen was an arbitrary number that I saw was when one could begin dating - maybe I thought this just because of the Mormon influences around me - but it seemed that with sixteen came a newfound maturity. It felt like an initiation into my next phase of life.
"I don’t want to grow up. I feel almost terrified when my friends make comments saying that they’re ready to be a thirty-something even though we’ve barely turned twenty. Or when my therapist said she thought I was an “old soul” — I immediately rejected her commentary."
Maybe I’m just trying to reconstruct memories, adding patches to the cuts and gaps and romanticizing my life to try to make it be like some coming of age film and match the John Green novels I obsessed over. On a deeper analysis, though, Green’s work and discussion of youth would have been truthful if he had chosen to write about people in the inbetweens of their teens and twenties - not fully out of one decade or fully adjusted to the other - instead of sixteen year olds “mature for their age.” Only now do I feel like I’ve stepped into the sepia tinted life of young adult fiction. In the past, I thought youth ended at twenty-two, like once you put on your cap and gown, your nights of reveling must draw a curtain. Perhaps this perception comes from my cousins who were the the only young adults I was around growing up. Even then I would only see them at holidays, and when they were 22, I was nine and, at nine, anyone older than you seems like a fully formed adult. I don’t know what I expected college to be like if I had deemed sixteen to be the climax of adolescence. College, in my opinion, harbors the youth experience and culture. It’s an incubator and catalyst for the behavior I categorize as being so youthful. But, our youth does not fleet away from our grasp once we have a diploma in hand. The concept of “youth” is something vague, expansive, and free. We choose when we want to grow up and and can choose to hang up that coat of adolescence when we so wish. Youth is a composition that has yet to be concluded -- still in the act of discovering the tempo and jumps waiting to be surprised and feel out when it naturally dwindles. The culture that co-exists with it is something that connects young adults throughout the country through shared experiences and interests.
But who decides these rules on youth? Who identifies what composes a youth experience and youth culture? Where is this person or these people? Is LA the hot spot? The internet?
To answer these questions I first have to define “youth culture.” How do you know where something is where you don’t even know what you’re looking for? To me, being young is more than just still being part of your parents’ health insurance plans but the intimate special moments you can really get away with before you have obligations such as a full time job, a family of your own, or the immense and flooding pressure of “adulthood” and maturity. But, above all else it’s a mindset and a choice. Anyone can pressure you to grow up, but you can still be responsible and youthful. There is no cutoff for when you must stop going out or being silly with your friends. Youth is a play composed of many acts and few intermissions.
When I think about moments of my own life that are essential to youth culture, my mind jumps to memories of sleepovers in my friend’s basement as we patiently waited for our midnight visitor to knock on her basement’s door, smoking weed in the forest just to drive around with absolutely no agenda before eventually deciding on getting slurpees from the same Sheetz we went to every time, driving out to see the abandoned elementary school the next town over from my hometown so we could peer into the broken down school bus outside. It’s memories of spending nights with my roommates smoking loose joints out the bedroom window, drinking cheap wine in the parks, and creating music together in our friend’s bedrooms. Memories of sleepovers at my friend’s apartment where all five of us sleep horizontally so we can sleep together in one bed. Having a language of phrases that only a few select people understand. Youth culture to me is the moments cut out of the coming-of- age films. The balance of freedom and danger -- being almost completely free but still having a chain holding us back, adding danger and excitement to it all. Those memories wouldn’t have the same energy and magic if we could openly do all those things with punishments or had absolutely no agenda. Youth culture are the moments between nothingness and hecticness, filled with self-made chaos and acts of enjoyment to consume that time with delight and risk.
The people you fill the gaps with are the people who fuel the memories of being young. That’s why every TV show that sells this nostalgia-fest of youthful excitement has a full ensemble of people -- one that comes to the top of my mind is That’s 70’s Show. Not that I view my life as a movie, but sometimes it’s fun to break it down that way. And I’m in love with the ensemble that make up the cast of my youth. They’re people who understand, just as much as I do, the tender and special place we are in our lives. My friends are artists and some of the funniest and most creative people on earth. Living with my friends this year, I feel like has put me at the peak of a young adult experience - not in like a Friends way. But it’s so special to be young and live with people going through the same things as you. Even more so, silence is easily filled with laughter and sadness swapped to joy.
I don’t want to grow up. I feel almost terrified when my friends make comments saying that they’re ready to be a thirty-something even though we’ve barely turned twenty. Or when my therapist said she thought I was an “old soul” — I immediately rejected her
commentary. It’s not age I’m afraid of, but the fear of having to abandon the silliness and free spirit of being young. Something I’ve always loved about my friends is how ageless I feel around them. Adolescence is such a special, tender, human experience. It’s about making mistakes. And it’s about growth - growth that often hurts. This youth has its own growth spurts that hurt not in a physical but mental and spiritual sense. And it’s something everyone gets to experience- I don’t know why people I know are so ready to throw it away before they’ve even become well acquainted with the second part of their adolescence. Youth is something to be savored and something I’m desperately trying to grip onto to whilst it’s still in my sight. I forever want my days to be filled with nights of friendship — from the extravagance to the little moments of sitting in my common room, laughing for hours about the dumbest jokes, to the minuscule memories, like having to clean up an entire smashed bottle of wine. I wish I could bathe myself in the memories I have and memories I still have to create.
To my friends who are presently drawing up escape plans out of youth -- from visions of marrying their high school sweethearts at twenty-one and moving to a suburb, to those already looking at buying the house next to their parents’ to live at a similarly too young age: there’s no pressure to give it all up / please do not abandon your youth. At least wait until you’re like twenty seven, but even then there is no countdown to growing up. A memory of present youth does not have to take place in your hometown, your college, or New York City. These future nostalgic memories can happen anywhere you are open to receive their impulse.
So where does our youth go? It goes where you decide. You are the keyholder and captivator to your own youth. All I have to say is from my own experience of my own youth which has simply begun. I have more nights to revel, more silence to fill, and more inside jokes yet to be discovered. To be young is my favorite chapter of life and one that I get to pen myself. And as I said before, if you really must fulfill some desire to move back to your hometown and have your children attend the same high school you did (although this act to me seems almost sinful in how comfortable it is for a person) at least wait until you’re twenty-seven. Twenty-seven is a respectful age to allow your youth to end and be only memorable in old 35mm photographs to document a better time.