“I’m too old for this,” I remember telling my girlfriend. We were making our way through throngs of well-dressed teenagers and twenty-somethings as a live band was performing onstage. I was with her to keep her company, just for a bit, at a local youth magazine’s anniversary party. But at the back of my mind, I was worrying about leaving early to work on the paper I had to write and the oral exam I needed to prepare for, among other responsibilities.
She became visibly upset by what I had said. “Are you?” she asked back after a while. The exchange was that simple, but it was enough to stop me in my tracks. I had stupidly thrown around an assumption about myself, and prior to that moment I had never really given it much thought: When are you ever “too old” for anything?
Unlike the protagonists that populate today’s coming-of-age narratives, I can’t pinpoint the particular chapters in my life where I “came of age.” On the one hand, I still cling on to that naïve idea that the young are invincible—I cram my papers, stay up too late, and drink more than I should. But at the same time, I can’t help but feel how, somewhere down the road, I may have missed out: I avoid upbeat parties like the plague, and shamelessly and consistently embody the phrase “Acads over lakads.”
But where—or when—do I draw the line? In following this way of life, my sole fear is that one day I might look back and say, “Maybe I could have enjoyed myself a bit more.” It’s not just that I tend to prioritize work over personal affairs; there’s also no denying that I’m caught neck-deep in an environment that fosters this mindset. From all sides of my immediate milieu, there is pressure—pressure to succeed, to become someone, to make something out of the privileges I’ve received.
And the fact that I’m a college senior now doesn’t help one bit. Internship craze? Been there. Career fair frenzy? Check. But all of these are but parts of the larger machinery that I’ve no choice but to ride with. What happened to that passionate thirst for life I once had?
Age, they say, is just a number. My number is 20—but I can’t help but feel that I’m way too young to be this jaded, and much too old to start afresh. I guess that numbers are never neutral in that sense: They can carry with them as much baggage as the context can accommodate.
A friend once told me that life is composed of stages; we are likely to feel unbearably old towards the end of a certain stage, and then ridiculously young once we hit the next one. This seems about as accurate, with my own memories as a freshman and with my batch’s graduation year looming around the corner. What bothers me the most, though, is how the lines between these stages tend to blur: When can we say that we’ve genuinely come of age? And what will that mean in terms of how we manage our angsts and pursue our aspirations?
I cannot claim any answers to these questions for now. However, I am of the belief that we understand our lives in reverse, that there is much clarity to be gained in viewing things in hindsight. Perhaps growing up, then, isn’t just about conclusively leaving behind a certain stage—it also involves acquiring a richer appreciation of that very stage we leave behind. I guess, in time, I’ll figure things out.
