For the past few months, I have begun to really feel the burden of being twenty-one. This is not in the typical Pakistani girl sense where I woe about not getting rishtay. I am thankful everyday that I was raised in a family that taught me to be independent. I am weighed down by the burden of being a person.
It is difficult to think of myself as anything other than twenty-one for instance but it is equally difficult to imagine myself as twenty-one. Legally, I can vote in an election, buy my own alcohol, buy cigarettes, enlist in the army, make my own decisions without a guardian signing off on them but I can not rent a car. Emotionally, I cant fathom how some of my friends are grown-ups enough to get married while others are too drunk or high to remember their last names. Physically, I feel as if I am finally being given a seat at the adults table but asked to still eat in the paper plates instead of the expensive china.
I know it's a weird time for everyone. You want to know the answers to everything and yet some part of you wants to cling to the child in you that would say screw it and stay up the whole night reading a good book before a 12-hour day. You find reasons-my body won't be able to handle this when I'm fifty, I will have other responsibilities and will regret these decisions, etc.
I keep thinking back to my freshman year self-so hopeful and filled with possibilities. I thought by the time I'd graduate I would have some sense of being. Perhaps know what I want in life or at least what to order at a bar. It's not that not knowing those things at twenty-one is particularly terrible, you can still get away with your naivete. It's just the idea of not having a time frame that bothers me. A part of me knows not to stick to convention like the Bible but another part of me balks at the idea of a journey I may not have the strength to bear. (I will always confuse bare and bear.)
Every few days I come up with a new plan for life. I have a flexible degree and there is coursera, I can learn things. I try to remind myself that I could be worse off. I could have gotten a degree in something I hated and had no career prospects. But there is this feeling of not doing enough that I can't seem to shake off. In my mind, after you hit thirty, life seems to end. Which isn't rational, I know, but it's always there. That I need to do XYZ by the time I'm thirty but I don't even know what career I want to pursue precisely. My dad, who is the most content and self-assured man I know, has changed his career at least three times in his entire life. Still he writes on the sidelines and has a few projects here and there to keep him busy.
It makes me sad that we as human beings have created so much simply to distract ourselves. This of course doesn't take away from the importance of the Art it inspires but at the bottom of it all is still a way to utilize time.
In the past few months, every time I have come across a friend of mine they have all said the same thing-that my major (Mathematics) has made me more calm and logical in the way I talk/think/react to life. It is certainly an humbling compliment but it makes me wonder how much of it is being rational and how much being passionless. I am perhaps a bit resentful towards my university for taking that passion away from me but it sounds petty, even to my ears.
I wonder, however, if I am indeed more logical and calm, then why do I constantly feel like that moment between the lightning strikes and you hear the thunder, where you're just holding your breath and waiting for the uproar of nature. Anxious, simply, because you do not know the extent of that sound. Will it be a quiet rumble, soft like being woken up from sleep by hushed voices in a distance? Or will it be loud as if your blood is responding to the storm outside and you can't tell where you stop being and the thunder starts?
