Today is my 18th birthday, and since this is the age of "adulthood" in our culture, it means a lot of new things in a person's life, and as such, it has brought up quite a few thoughts as well.
Firstly, I don't feel like an adult. I don't feel any different from the 17-year-old person I was yesterday. When I was younger, I would look at adults and think "That person knows how the world works. That is a person who has obtained adult-knowledge, and is certified to do adult things." I honestly believed that, somehow, people knew all of the things that they needed to know to function in society at this point in their lives, but in all honesty, my dad still helps me do my taxes, and I can't even tell you what the word "mortgage" means. Suddenly, I'm an adult. It didn't come with an epiphany, it didn't come after I passed a test, it didn't seem special at all. I simply woke up this morning and thought "Oh, it's my birthday. I guess it's legal to smoke and watch porn now."
Secondly, I'm scared as hell of growing up. My greatest passion in life is adventure, and in a small town like the one I live in, that means trespassing into places you aren't allowed with a group of friends and having fun. If the police were to catch me doing that yesterday, it would have been "just a bunch of damn kids messing around," but today, it's "catching a man trespassing on private property." I'm losing all of the innocence I've taken for granted my entire life, and it's impossible to ever get it back. Everyone that I've grown up with and gone to school with are going to separate universities and moving away--everyone is growing and everything is changing. I'm reaching the peak of my youth, and soon I'm going to be 20, then 30, then 40, then I've lost all of my hair and not long after that I'm dead. My feet have already been placed upon that path.
How do you slow things down?
-ec.wolf
