#suspendedthoughts

When I started out as a freshman in college, I remember being told how young I looked. On two separate occasions this quality proved to be whimsically annoying because I didn’t have a convenient form of identification to back up my actual age: buying a ticket to an R-rated film and buying an M-rated video game, both of which required me to be 17 - I was 18 at the time. I had gone back to retrieve my passport to watch said film, but couldn’t bother with the video game because it was a Black Friday special. I remember being absolutely flabbergasted after hearing the Best Buy clerk remark that I could be a really smart 16 year old when I tried to present my right to buy the video game with my university identification; Thanks, I guess... 

Fast forward to a conversation about age during my sophomore year. At 19, my friend commented that she felt “old,” which I could not understand since my experiences with age were all associated with looking physically younger than I was.

Fast forward to earlier this year, 2015. I look older, much thanks to my decision to grow out my hair. However I still feel as though I’m still the same age as I was entering freshman year. 

Fast forward to now, September. I think I know what it’s like to feel old now. No, its not being a senior, ready to begin the end of my undergraduate career. No, its not seeing my high school classmates beginning a completely new volume in their lives, while I’m doing my fifth year (shout out to Northeastern!).  No, its not even meeting the new freshmen coming in who were still in middle school while I was a senior in high school, though it is mind-boggling to think about.

Feeling old is about taking risks. 

Its about taking a new one even when the last one failed. Its about embracing life as it comes because happiness is just a surge of emotion when the risk pays off, but only to be left trying to find it again; the only way to do that is to take more risks. To her, happiness made up for its lack of length with its height. To her, feeling old was about being lost, desperately trying to find her way back. With that, she left the East Coast and went back west.

As for me, feeling old was about being stuck, desperately trying to find my way forward. 

I think its fitting for her to be on the West Coast while I’m on the east because she found comfort in the past while I found it in the future. Feeling old is about taking risks because without them, we’d both be stuck trying to find a way to ignore our depression.  PS.  “La vie est dure, mais elle est belle” -François Truffaut