Midnight Remarks

A week ago today I turned 21. It came without fanfare; a restaurant dinner with my family and a modest gathering of loved ones the weekend before were all that set it apart from any other day. In fact, the only unusual thing about it was that I worked a Wednesday shift instead of my usual Sunday (a pitiful reminder that I have been without the economically unbothered naivety of childhood for some time).

In the days that followed, I finished the TV show 20-year-old me had been watching, and began the one she had been dying to watch next. Those assignments glaring at me through the gaps in a carelessly strewn-together wall of procrastination remained untouched. I listened to the same songs I had been burning into the grooves of my brain all of February and March.

But perhaps most obtrusive of all, as I watched an overlooked Mary Bennet learn to love herself in London society, and as I listened to the abrasive crooning of Cameron Winter finding who he’s gonna be from now on, I realised I was still burdened by a suffocating thirst for all the things I would-one-day-but-could-not-presently pursue. In turning 21, I had not only failed to escape discontentment with my current situation, but I still could not fathom a version of myself that could live contentedly with it. Last Wednesday marked the expiration of childhood as a viable excuse for the postponement of my own fulfillment. It marked the day even the US deemed me old enough to drink alcohol, to take my life into my own hands. And yet, in reaching ‘drinking age’, in having my last badge of youth confiscated, I have not grown old enough to do anything productive towards furthering my own life.

That empty feeling has therefore intensified over the last week. I suppose I should have been more specific begging change to herald me into my 22nd year. But despite the stagnant nature of my life at the moment, and my apparent inability to do anything about it, perhaps the fact I can be burdened by such lofty ambitions (and for so long too!) is a feat in itself. And, if I can convince myself that the end of my youth is in fact the beginning of the rest of my life, and that there is some comfort in the fact that 21 looks so much like 20, maybe those ambitions become less unattainable. Maybe reaching drinking age will be the spark that allows me to quench my thirst for something more.