Trigger from Such, Such Were the Joys...

Ashley G.
Professor Zoller
Life Narratives
9/25/2012

“And the child thinks of growing old as an almost obscene calamity, which for some mysterious reason will never happen to itself.” George Orwell in Such, Such Were the Joys

                You would think that by college it would have hit me already. I should feel, at least somewhat, like an adult. But I don’t. I guess I never have liked change. When I turned five for example, I hid under the table at my birthday party with my family because I didn’t want to turn five. I didn’t grasp the idea that I was turning five no matter how much I whined; I did not have the power to stop the clock. Though it is not just the fact that I want to stop the clock, it is the fact that I don’t think that the clock moves as fast as it does. When I was in elementary school, high school students looked so big and I never thought I would be that big, not in a million years. Despite the fact that I am still vertically challenged, I did make it through high school. Never in my childhood did I think I would actually get to college. It’s not that I didn’t think I was smart enough, I just thought, “I’ll never be that old.” Growing up in a Christian home my belief that would never reach adulthood increased by the book of Revelation.  After hearing all about the Rapture and the fact that many Bible scholars thought that it could be near I decided that the Rapture would come before I was “an adult.”

Okay maybe that’s a weird way of looking at things but even now I think, “I’m never ever going to be as old as my parents.” The concept just makes my head spin. Even as I am a college student working to be en elementary school teacher somewhere in the back of my mind I think that I will never actually get to my career. Perhaps this is my way of pacifying the part of my personality that hates change. I say to that part of my brain, “No, don’t worry I’m never actually going to be that old.” The anti- change part of my brain breathes a sigh of relief and wipes its imaginary brow. But another part of brain, however small and quiet, knows that the inevitable is coming; someday I will be twenty five, thirty, and forty. The anti- change part of my brain is still reeling that I’m going to be nineteen in three months.

That’s not to say that I’m not excited about getting older but somehow I feel like I’m never going to get there. Even in high school I couldn’t comprehend that I would graduate eventually but I did and I’m still processing that fact. I remember sitting next to my friends in the front row looking out at all the parents in front of us in the bleachers. I tired so very hard to drink in every word that my friends said in their valedictorian and salutatorian speeches and still I felt like a passive observer, like this wasn’t my graduation. Well it was and now I’m a college student. Weird huh?

     Now my anti- change brain has moved onto my next graduation. “You’ll never be twenty-two, you’ll never graduate college. You’re smart and everything, but it just isn’t going to happen.”  I’ve given up arguing with the anti- change brain, perhaps it will always be back there under my dining room table screaming that I will never be five for as long as I live.