I'm so young. I should feel no pressure. I should feel no anxiety. That's what older people say. They look back at their lives and they look at us 20-somethings - they see kids who can't appreciate how "easy" their lives are - our simple, naive concerns are funny.
But it's all relative. Of course you can laugh at us, given that you've already been through it. You turned out all right. You more or less made it in the world. That doesn't always happen though. I'm coming up in a different world. I'm approaching my 21st birthday and, although it's nothing like turning 40, it symbolizes something heavy and it scares the shit out of me. Now, all of a sudden, I have to be an ADULT. I have to start participating in the economy and thinking about things that I never thought I'd have to think about. I feel like I'm stumbling into a new adolescence. I feel like my 20s are going to become the baddest muthafucking hangover I've ever had. My 20s are going to either make or break me.
Then there's these people getting married before graduating undergrad. They add to the problem. They're getting married, and I don't even know what the word "married" means. (I'm conjuring iron bars, an electric fence, the evilness exhibited by my parents for 18 years, while they tried to figure out why they didn't like each other ...) Is this something that I'm supposed to think about? Is this what being an adult means?
20 was weird because it dawned on me that I'd been alive for two decades. But 21 ... 21 is the beginning of it all. No more fucking around. At 21 you're faced with the reality of things: you are no longer a child and you're at the bottom of the food-chain in a big-ass world. No other thought is more sobering than this one, at this point in my life.
