Edited by: Lavanya Goswami
So, I turned twenty last week. By the time this article comes out, it’ll have been two weeks already. And I’ll have gotten a little more used to the fact that I’m twenty.
On my birthday, I woke up before everyone else in the house. The sun rose a little bit later than it usually does and the world kept spinning, inconsiderate of me and my unstoppable hurtle towards maturity and adulthood.
In all honesty, I’d never really put much thought into it. 19 felt like a huge feat, 18 felt even bigger. But 20 is enormous. Isn’t it? Two decades of life…over, gone, accounted for. And what do I have, to show for it?
As my birthday had neared, I had felt myself over and surrounded by a deep, visceral sort of dread, concerning self-worth and existence and life. I had wanted more for myself by this time; I had expected more. I was supposed to be all grown up and mature but I still felt the same as when I was eighteen or nineteen. It just felt like an extension of my eighteenth birthday like…eighteen(1).pdf and then eighteen(2).pdf like the unnecessary duplicate files you save onto your computer.
Over two years of college, I had maybe learnt a few more fancy words, made a few more friends, and submitted a few more assignments. Granted, I joined some clubs, and maybe read more books than I had in the previous three years. But, is that what being twenty meant? Is that all being twenty meant? It felt like I’d been stuck inside a 4×6 room for almost two years now, and time had stopped meaning anything. But it hadn’t. Two years had still passed, and I was still growing older. I was still turning twenty. I think this feeling holds true for most people who’ve lived through the pandemic, especially for those of us who attended school or college from home. Our new normal has been this feeling of stagnation, this difference in temporality.
When I was younger, twenty-year-olds—or rather the concept of twenty-year-olds—seemed so foreign and far away. Twenty, the big two-oh—this age, this period was something I associated with jobs and marriage and drinking, even kids. Now, being twenty myself, I cannot even fathom the idea of marriage, let alone kids, and I barely just declared my major. I don’t really know what I want to do for the rest of my life. Everything just seems to be moving so fast. Being twenty is so different from what I thought it would be like. And I don’t know what to do with it. I feel so incredibly young, still so ignorant and naive and small.
I met my counsellor on the day after I turned twenty, and it was a wreck. I came to her, overcome with an incessant restlessness and urgency and some sorrow too. Everything suddenly seemed so much bigger and this forced me to contemplate about the things I had accomplished over the last year, the last few years, and I couldn’t help but feel that I should have said more, read more, learned more, just done more, even if I wasn’t completely sure what that “more” could have even been.
When I met my counsellor, I didn’t know what to say to her. And I didn’t know what I needed from her, but she did. She told me that I needn’t hold myself to normalcy, or punish myself for my struggles, because nothing about this was normal. The pandemic was unprecedented and uncalled for and—even after so many months of its inception—unpredictable. It affected everyone’s lives, in big ways and small. And this perspective had to be taken into account as well. So, the things I expected of myself at twenty would have to be ‘shifted’ just like everything else. Like the time I’d be coming to campus was ‘shifted’. Like the experiences that I should have had by now, had things been normal—far outside the confines of this familiar room — had ‘shifted’. In a way, time was different. And my expectations, my goals and everything that I had thought I would achieve by twenty too, had to be ‘shifted’. Maybe, the things I would have done by twenty, now I would do at twenty-one, maybe twenty-two. Yes, I was older, but it need not be a burden. Everyone was growing older just like me, and it was understood, generally, that things had been different, that things are different. And we would have to learn to be patient with ourselves.
She left me with that. I suppose that’s what I wanted to share as well. I turned twenty, and it wasn’t the life-changing, revolutionary, grand thing I had thought it would be when I was fourteen. I haven’t gotten my life together, not in the least bit, and there’s so much more I thought I would do that I haven’t done yet, but it’s okay. I will get there. It’ll just be slower. And this doesn’t just apply to me. The pandemic was global and I’m sure it’s ‘shifted’ most people’s lives, not just mine. And that’s not easy to accept but it is true, and it’s necessary to acknowledge that and just…be patient.
So maybe I’ll step on campus for the first time at twenty instead of eighteen, and maybe I’ll feel twenty at twenty-two, and maybe you will too, dear reader, and everything will still somehow be okay.