In her column “Nostalgic Thoughts,” Alaina Zhang ’27 reminisces on the past and reflects on why we miss it at all.
On Rednote, I once read a quote that went something like this: “One cannot feel like an adolescent and be an adolescent at the same time.” In other words, when I am an adolescent, I am always thinking back to when I was a kid, and when I am an adult, I reminisce about the times that I was an adolescent.
But, those nostalgic thoughts can never actually coexist at the same time as when I am in my adolescence.
Different colors bloom in my mind when I think of the adolescent era in general. Green fireflies in a rice field at night. Running with friends against a darkening violet sky. The soft orange light illuminating a bedroom desk. Steam rising from a full bowl of white rice.
What makes up the adolescent experience is largely the sense of nostalgia associated with a transient period of life that is forever frozen in time. Adolescence is a magical, mythical period of time when the self begins to develop and different thoughts and experiences are brought together by the mind to ask the question of “who am I?”
The edges of adolescence are blurry, with no clear boundaries for when it begins or ends. What was once a child begins to question the rules that dictated its simple routines and make way for its own place in the world.
I always find myself living in the past because there is something comforting in already knowing what has happened to you. Adolescence feels like that to me. The harsh edges of pain are dulled, leaving only a faint sweetness to the memory. The future, no matter how bright or how much you look forward to it, is always uncertain and therefore dangerous, threatening even.
When I was a kid, I didn’t want to grow up, because I think a part of me always knew what was going to happen. I would get older and realize that this present moment as a kid was far more wonderful than any future moment. My life had little troubles, like not being able to sleep by myself or struggling to finish my lunch in under an hour, but other than that it was all I could ask for. There was a simple rule to childhood: that when dreaded tasks were done, I could do things I liked, and I was good at following that rule.
The arrival of adolescence brought little changes to this mindset. Like little me hypothesized, I began to develop nostalgia for my childhood filled with easy tasks and fast rewards. However, changes were frightening as the world became more complicated, so instead, I forced myself to continue to be a kid as much as possible even as it proved impossible.
What I didn’t realize then was that in the act of trying to live as a kid, I had unconsciously avoided the responsibilities of being an adolescent, to allow myself to be confused about the world and explore the changes around me, and therefore simultaneously relinquished the chance to truly experience adolescence.
But now, as a twenty-one-year old, I’m legally an adult but choose to live like an adolescent. I took up dancing again, a childish dream of mine, and tried to be less strict towards myself. I realized that the rules were shifting — I didn’t have to do certain things in order to do others because I make the rules now.
Some of the freedom associated with adulthood was determining what I wanted to do and when I wanted to do them. Occasionally I wonder if I’m being too childish, too selfish and too lenient towards myself, but if I didn’t do that now, would I not also never experience this chaotic but beautiful transition between adolescence and adulthood?
I’m choosing to live a delayed adolescence now, like sakuras in late bloom.