Stuck in the middle(bury)

This past January, as the nation collectively reflected on the past decade and prepared for the next one, I bid a fond farewell to my teenage years — and all the awkwardness, angst and acne that accompanied them. Needless to say, I wasn’t too broken up to see them go, but my anxiety about the decade to come didn’t set in until months after the celebrations ended, and I stopped mistakenly reporting my age as 19.

My anxiety came from myriad sources, half relating to the fact that 10 years ago I was 10, the other half to the fact that in 10 more I’ll be 30. Older readers would probably (rightfully) scoff at an assertion that “I’m old!” and I’ve even had peers tell me that my age-related anxiety is groundless. In some ways, I’m inclined to agree with them — I don’t actually think my life is nearing the end, or that my best years are behind me and it’s all downhill from here.

Nevertheless, this summer brought a host of new life experiences that served to make me feel older than I’ve ever felt, and left me toeing the line of whether to desperately cling to my innocent youth, or dive head first into the new adventures of adulthood.

First and foremost, I moved out of my mom’s house and into my own, albeit for the mere three months of summer. Regardless of the length of my residency, it was the first time I had dealt with a landlord, written a rent check, paid bills and generally acted like a self-sufficient human. While I missed my mom’s cooking and the Ross salad bar, cooking for myself every night led to some interesting experiences and new life skills. Though paying for heat, electricity, the Internet and a roof over my head was hard on my wallet, the complete freedom I felt in my own house was worth it 100 times over.

Smaller happenings throughout the summer reinforced my feelings of age and my apprehension at leaving my youth behind. I was forced to wear a button-down shirt and tie to work, making my humble position as a drug store clerk feel unsettlingly career-like. Then Toy Story 3 came out, and I felt the pang of nostalgia and guilt as I thought of all my childhood toys. I reconnected with people I hadn’t been close with since I was in elementary school. I did laundry in a laundromat. I drove to Tennessee.

Finally, the day before I moved back to Middlebury, my family and I endured the unbearable sadness of putting down our dog, Yogi, who had been in our family since I was six. As a constant in my life through all of my formative years, much of my pain stems from not being able to imagine the world without him. His death was inevitable, of course, but my life still felt suddenly and irreversibly different the moment he went limp in my arms. As the finale to my summer of independence, it seemed to confirm without a doubt that this summer was a shift from one phase of my life to another (according to the New York Times, this might soon be officially called my “emerging adulthood”).

So my return to Middlebury was bittersweet but not in the way you might expect. It felt simultaneously relieving and nauseating to be back on our safe and sterile campus. Here, 18-year-olds enter and 22-year-olds leave, but for the four intervening years exist in an essentially ageless vacuum where they all enjoy the same institutional benefits of housing, food and education. Neither the starry-eyed first-year in her Allen double nor the thesis-writing senior in his Voter suite are fully functioning, “real world” adults; one may be closer to being there, and may have gotten tastes of it, like me, over a summer or time abroad, but neither has felt its full wrath quite yet. What some characterize as a bubble, I think of more as The Scrambler carnival ride: it’s exhilarating and tumultuous, but ultimately we know that it’s incredibly rare for anything to go seriously wrong. It’s real, but not — it’s simulated excitement.

So while I can’t say it’s not a relief to have two more years of unlimited dining hall food and a comfortable living situation, there were aspects of the real world this summer that I’m grateful to have experienced and will truly miss. Most problematically, I can’t help but feel at a disadvantage to my peers at UVM, the vast majority of whom will graduate with two years of off campus living experience.
Ultimately, however, I am comforted by the notion that I have two more years during which I can gradually let go of my youth while embracing the onset of adulthood — that should be ample time to collect enough Proctor bag lunches to last me a solid year after graduation.