turning 20 years old
getting ahead, falling behind, wasting time, and running out of it
Most of my teens were spent wishing that it would go by faster. I’d lived almost all of it in my hometown, a well-planned suburb just an hour north of Houston, and at age fourteen I’d come to the conclusion that there was nothing left for me there besides my family and the rodeo.
If you can imagine a classically American public high school, you can imagine mine. We had a cafeteria partitioned more or less by clique and association; a bell that rang to mark the end of each class; and a mediocre football team that won local games with much fanfare. I went to one game every season—the homecoming one—because I was on student council, and the class officers were tasked with crowning the court. Each year I made my annual pilgrimage across the 25-yard-line to sash the homecoming king, never fully understanding Friday Night Lights but appreciating the appeal: the cheerleaders tumbling on the field, crowd roaring, stadium humming with infectious fervor.
At times I felt that I was looking into a spyglass. This was what high school was supposed to be like; this is what the movies made it all out to be. My friends and I were siloed away as part of a magnet program within our school that demanded from us satisfactory standardized test scores and the unbending will to take as many Advanced Placement classes as our school offered. In return, we’d take specialized math and science classes and engage in year-long research projects to be presented at science fairs and symposiums. I grew more and more apathetic towards the sciences in part because everything had turned into a punishing competition, and in part because I was interested in wasting time by writing stories, and I found myself staying after class to talk to my English teachers and considering, to the horror of my well-meaning parents, a career in the humanities.
I respected the technical, pre-professional education—at least pragmatically—and nowhere else could feel more like home than Texas, but it felt like I was wading through thick water, and I could see land just before me: college, the city. I couldn’t wait to graduate. I was tired of calculus class, the strip mall, the Cheesecake Factory that was the site of every dinner before a school dance.
For almost all of sophomore and junior year, my friends and I moved restlessly around campus, desperate to leave. At the beginning of senior year, when teachers and counselors were just starting to ask where we wanted to go to school, we’d respond as if we hadn’t really given it much thought—“Honestly, anywhere outside of Texas”—when really, we could already taste the incoming cosmopolitan education. Cable-knit sweaters, ironed collars, rigor, passion, scholarship, and depth. That spring, we got back acceptances and rejections, and a handful of waitlists and scholarships. I wrote cards for graduation parties, helped my friends agonize over their decisions. In May, I committed to college.
Does time move differently in your hometown? Maybe it does when you treat it like a transient space. An in-between meant to build you up to the person who you are before you leave.
In the summer after high school, everything fell perfectly into place. One chapter had closed, and another one was opening wider and wider, spilling over with possibility. I was suspended in a perfect intermediate, going somewhere but not yet there, enjoying how time stretched before me like taffy, easy and sugary and light.
In June, I went to New York City for a writing program and walked under the trees in Central Park with a friend I had made, who would be attending Harvard with me in the fall. We were both giddy with excitement. We talked about majors and dorms and boys. In July, I began to map out the rest of my life. I needed to decide what classes I would take, and if they satisfied the requirements of my school, and what classes were interesting to me, and which ones were easy A’s, so I could account for my GPA in case I wanted to go to grad school or just to attend to my pride. I made a document listing the clubs that all of the upperclassmen seemed to be in (consulting) and then another document of places that I wanted to explore in Boston (the Brandy Melville on Newbury Street) and then a third document of dorm essentials (twenty feet of string lights, throw pillows, and a broken vintage alarm clock for purely decorative purposes). I faced the inevitability of leaving with a determined kind of ferocity to make the next few years everything that I wanted it to be, so that I was at least leaving for something.
My grand plans for a radical college reinvention, to wring from the university everything that it could possibly offer me, was rooted in the tricky belief that in order to succeed, I needed proof of it. I was on the path to something more, higher and bigger: an unstoppable force hurtling towards the greatness that Harvard would demand from—and make possible for—me. I would apply to the consulting club because everybody else did.
After New York, I went to Taiwan to see my family. I found myself falling into a comfortable step, walking from my grandmother’s apartment to the city park, driving up the mountains to visit temples and tombs, diving into cold beach water. My relatives gushed over me and my verifiable success. They grasped my hands and cupped my face. I didn’t want any of it to end. Regardless of my worst fears about my own future, my family thought that I was off to do good. Shouldn’t that count for something?
Before we graduated, my friends and I had begged our teacher to show us what she’d written in her letters of recommendation. Her class was my favorite, and I cared way too much about what she thought of me. Each day after school, we crowded around her desk, and at some point we weathered her down. She printed out copies of our recommendation letters, and we were allowed five minutes with them. I don’t remember much from mine—in the frenzy of trying to remember every word, I had forgotten most of them—but I do remember reading something about my being able to change the world.
The validation didn’t cure my impending sense of doom, or more accurately the panicky feeling of watching sand fall through an hourglass. There were the typical adulting fears, when I realized that my childhood years were truly over, and then there was the dawning realization that I had about a month before I was expected to produce some new deliverable, a display-worthy success. Despite their best efforts, my family and teachers did little to alleviate my most private concern: I was very surely and very rapidly running out of time.
My generation is afraid to age. Some of it, I think, is all about appearances. A variety of risk factors—growing up in a time when the front-facing camera exists as a concept and as a device; seeing products like red-light-therapy masks take over the market; being unable to extricate ourselves from social media and its measurable validation model of likes, comments, and reposts—means that what we look like often becomes the most important thing about us. Never before have we scrutinized ourselves so thoroughly, and so often. The summer after my freshman year of college, one of my girlfriends turned twenty and announced that she was looking into preventative Botox. The rest of us quietly bought retinol.
I wish I could say that it was all superficial, but I sometimes think that being young has also become an inarguable part of my generation’s identity. It’s not that we’re uniquely scared to grow up (everyone is), or that we’re the only ones who ever engaged with an edgy counterculture (everyone has), or even that we’ve been imbued with coming-of-age media that makes us idolize that period of our lives (doesn’t everyone love to be young?). It’s that the timeline has compressed on itself. Johann Hari writes in Stolen Focus that “the increase in the volume of information is what creates the sensation of the world speeding up.” The more information that’s pumped into the system, he says, the less people can actually focus on any single piece of it.
So everything moves faster. Content. News. Trends. Fashion. Who’s in and who’s out. What’s trending, and what’s fading into obscurity. Everyone is in a rush; everyone is optimizing. 20-minute lunch breaks are spent hunched over laptops, fingers tapping and dragging and scrolling because the world stops for no one. I imagine myself holding on tightly to a piece of plywood in the middle of the storm, trying to search for an anchoring point. Ages ago it might’ve been religion; a century prior, family and domestic life. I don’t know what it is—or could be—so now I distract myself with the debris that flies by—something to be mad about online, a funny TikTok trend, a new accomplishment—as everything else careens out of control.
I published my first article at fourteen and competed in all of the young writer contests, befriending high-schoolers who published their first poetry collections at seventeen and became laureates shortly after, and learning alongside them that we had hit the ground running, so we had better keep it up. The firehose of deadlines and news and buzzer sounds hits me squarely in the face, and I’m so distracted that I can’t keep up or slow down. Turning twenty is my last hurrah, becoming twenty-five means calcifying into irrelevance. By thirty I will be a fossil.
What am I doing, I asked my brother over the phone. I was almost done with my first year at college. I could map out big, formative moments—my first college fling, first football game, first time going to Connecticut and New Hampshire, first time I got an A on a paper, first time I did poorly on an assignment, making the friends that are dear to me even today, losing touch with others—and I kept a meticulous calendar of my daily goings-on: class, lunch in the dining hall, dinner in the city, coffee chat, club meeting, conference, party. It was both a micro and macro documentation of what had happened to me, yet I had no idea where the time had gone.
Lots of it was forfeited, stupidly enough, to boys. My friends and I pressed around my phone to analyze a four-word text. We went on bad dates, had anticlimactic hookups. We hosted wine nights, which were really just opportunities to monologue about men and the ways in which they’d failed us. When that started to seem like too humiliatingly obvious a waste of time, we sequestered ourselves in the library to study, to feel like we were working towards some end goal, or that we were doing something, anything, to try to get ahead—at least that was the case for me. I caught up on lectures and applied for summer internships like there was an imminent deadline that I was constantly inching towards, even if I could not immediately see it. I only had one chance. I was—foolishly, passively, pitifully—frozen in place.
That September, I ate dust. I was rejected from the consulting club. I lost my 4.0 the next semester. The most pressing problem was that I was now suspended between two opposing ideas, unable to pick a side: I wasn’t particularly good at math, but at least I could make good money, and I wasn’t particularly good at writing, but at least I loved it.
The only common denominator was that I felt hopelessly behind. The financiers already knew the meaning of the word econometrics and had taken multivariable calculus in high school. The writers knew Kerouac and McCarthy and wrote brilliant essays at their brilliant art schools. I was lagging behind on both fronts, and in my inability to make a decision on which one I’d pursue, was falling behind even more. Year one out of four was over, and what did I have to show for it? A handful of inconsequential achievements, a list of application rejections, a shockingly low bank balance, and the sad ability to ascertain the exact number of calories in a meal?
I took long walks around Cambridge. Time stretched infinitely before me like syrup, in a way that was both soothing and terrifying. I had so much time. What was I supposed to do with it? The more I sat and thought about it, the more it slipped through my fingers. With no easy answers, I walked from Harvard Square to Central to Kendall in search of at least a somewhat-satisfying explanation, headphones on, tearing up sometimes, trying to pinpoint the exact moment when I had lost my way. Sometime between September and April, I had strayed from the schedule. I came to college with so-called promise and was leaving, in the words of my professor when we had to read a particularly confusing passage, “utterly bereft.”
A few weeks ago, I led a class discussion about Joan Didion for my writing workshop. I loved this workshop and its close readings. I loved when the students talked about “throughlines” and “vectors” in the stories that we read and dissected them word by word.
Didion belonged to that camp of writers that everyone had somehow come into university with intimate knowledge of already. Everyone had read On Self Respect and Goodbye to All That, everyone seemed to understand the obscure references and authorial lore. One of my friends told me that college classes were “just like high school.” She’d gone to boarding school in Europe, to which I felt both panic and envy. Was college just one big game of catch-up? Even that admission felt self-aggrandizing. There was nothing stopping me from reading Joan Didion.
So I did. Truthfully? I enjoyed catching up. I read what my professor had assigned, and then scrolled through reading guides. I arrived at On Keeping a Notebook:
We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were. I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be; one of them, a seventeen-year-old, presents little threat, although it would be of some interest to me to know again what it feels like to sit on a river levee drinking vodka-and-orange-juice and listening to Les Paul and Mary Ford and their echoes sing "How High the Moon" on the car radio… The other one, a twenty-three-year-old, bothers me more. She was always a good deal of trouble, and I suspect she will reappear when I least want to see her, skirts too long, shy to the point of aggravation, always the injured party, full of recriminations and little hurts and stories I do not want to hear again, at once saddening me and angering me with her vulnerability and ignorance, an apparition all the more insistent for being so long banished.
It is a good idea, then, to keep in touch…
I remember only vaguely being seventeen years old, mostly because I was planning ruthlessly for the future. I believed that the clock to my life would only start ticking when I left Texas, and that the stretch of time beforehand was only prologue. I gave into journalistic impulse, to rush, to be the first to cover a story, to create a narrative for myself that I could cleanly fulfill. I learned too late to savor that space between being and becoming; it changes so fast, you really can’t blink. This is me trying to reach out and grab at it before it passes me by.
your writing is so beautiful and authentic