Sophia White-

By the time this article reaches the rest of campus, my 19th birthday will be in two days. The last year in my teens. Yet 19 just feels like a number that means nothing in terms of age. It feels awkward to be placed between 18 and 20. At 18 you become an adult (in most states), which is such a freeing feeling. With 20, while it doesn’t grant you too many more freedoms, it does recognize that you have reached two decades of living and are reaching that place in adulthood where it actually feels official.

If I was still living in Nebraska (my home state) I would now legally be an adult at 19, but even that still doesn’t really affect me. I don’t feel like there’s much I need to mentally prepare myself for when turning 19. The only thing it is making me think about is turning 20, which is terrifying. Yet with all these numbers, I don’t really feel prepared for it, because the pandemic has set me back 2 years mentally. If others feel this way, you might be feeling a sense of dread towards aging because of this – feeling less prepared than the college students that came before you, because everything is happening so fast.

I’ve never felt scared to age until I realized how close I am to turning 20. Many of you are already 20 or older than that, and some of you may have experienced the same crisis of aging that I am having. Or maybe the opposite of that – feeling nothing at all. But regardless of that, I’m sure many of you could recognize the odd stigma our society has around aging. Recently, I finished Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom as part of the J-term PA book club, and the book talks a lot about the stigma around aging, death, and illness. I highly recommend you read it if you haven’t.

A big thing I got out of the book is that nobody in a society of fast-paced efficiency wants to feel helpless, but it inevitably happens when you get to an age where you no longer need others to take care of you. And it seems hypocritical to make people believe that they are useless if they depend on others occasionally for help because at the end of the day depending on one another helps people feel better and cope with a fast-paced life.

Inevitably, we’ll miss all the things in childhood that felt slowed down and full of nostalgia. A lot of things will only be socially acceptable again when you have kids, puppies, or kittens. I can no longer say “I’m just a child!” in defense of my actions, and swinging on a swing at a playground won’t be socially acceptable unless I have a kid of my own to do it with. I have to decide how much I want to be responsible for something at a given time or maybe if I want to be responsible for the life of a person or animal. A lot of these things are things I have never thought of before.

I am at a place in life where aging sticks out, and it has made me think about how to approach my 20s and even the rest of my life. Questions about what I want long-term for myself and for the people and communities I care about. It seems like a lot on top of classes, internships, studying abroad, or whatever the publicity of Gustavus Adolphus’ whereabouts may be.

One thing is for sure, I don’t want that to be an extreme stressor in my life for the next 20 years and I may need to determine whether I let society rule how I live my life as I age or if I just play by my own set of cards. Truly some of you could be so busy that you never think of these things, and I may be a serious overthinker. But I know I am not the only one, so for those of you who overthink important or unimportant things and have several mini-crises, I hope you know that others are going through the motions, too.