Prasnav Naik

With another semester ending and another round of friends leaving everything behind to start their lives anew, the fear of becoming a “real adult” grows. As an RA, I’m hearing about everyone’s first year coming to an end and trying to cram in a few more future memories. And that stirred panic in me, given I have a semester remaining of my undergraduate. Have I completed what I want to? What do I have left to experience? Realistically, I have been doing exactly what I want to and am prepared to graduate. The real issue has to do with becoming older. And everything seems to revolve around this real-life motif. I’ve become more attentive to the classic “I feel so old” and “time flies by too fast” humorless one-liners from graduating college students and amongst those, the “we are young” comments from new adults trying to convince themselves high school wasn’t the end of their youth. It seems ironic that we who haven’t even left university feel devoid of novelty and as if we are becoming our elders too fast.

Now in the workforce, hearing passerby conversations, it doesn’t seem that this unescapable phobia ever disappears. But I guess if this innate discomfort was with me when I was 15, is with me right now when I’m 22, and will continue to be with me when I’m in my 30’s, then it feels less like stress and more like a condemnation. Instead of letting my mind continue that spiral, I decided to take solace in books, and the theme seemed to jump from the world into the author’s worlds (e.g., Circe by Madeline Miller, Addie La Rue by V. E. Schwab, etc.). Some talked about the beauty of being able to age, and others spoke about the importance of living your full life in the time you have. There was a sense of acceptance amongst these characters and the need for change, a paradox that being young even gets old. But in a world obsessed with being youthful and having accomplishments at a younger and younger age, the messages morphed into ideals of experiencing everything rather than the comfort of our decomposition. I guess I don’t know if the two opposing lessons are entirely separate.

It makes me think maybe we shouldn’t come to terms with aging but rather be more content where we are at in every stage, and maybe that’s what leads to a more fulfilling life. Because at 30, I still will be myself and will know what I want for myself then. And at 50, I still will be myself and will know what I want for myself then. If I’ll still want to aimlessly wander the streets of the city I live in then, then I’ll do it, and if I’ll want to scroll through the hundreds of social media posts which I won’t remember, there’s nothing really stopping me. So what actually changes in ourselves? Is it novelty that makes you feel the freshness of life? The new people in our lives will come and go, and we’ll come and go to new places, and there might be new responsibilities and relationships. Still, the one thing that we have complete control of is doing what we want in the way we want, so if I want to feel young at 80, it might be hard to do so, but newness is only in its juxtaposition to oldness, so can it be finite? I guess what I’m trying to say is we are only as old as we feel.

But then again I’m completely unqualified to make this assumption. How would I know? I’m pretty young.

A year ago, an entirely different version of me had no idea what was in store for the year. I remember wistful belligerence about returning back to campus after Spring Break and for the pandemic to be as ephemeral as the rest of the year was. Life was good. I was doing well in classes, had friends of every caliber, and felt pretty confident about myself. It honestly would have been a surprise to me to find that in the absence of the sedimented setting I had just gotten used to, I was able to have one of the best years of my life.

The COVID-19 pandemic is a tragedy for sure, impacting the lives of so many across the world. I am fortunate enough that so far, my biggest concern was the countdown in my head. A single year of college left. Two semesters to do everything I wanted at Tech. Two semesters left with my friends. Two semesters before being helpless to face the fact that I didn’t know what life outside of college would be like. Time was an hourglass with each sandy sediment slipping more swiftly and emptying the top vial. I guess a sandstorm wasn’t expected because it began to feel like the grains weren’t falling vertically anymore, and for some miraculous reason, I was suspended in the air. I had a chance to catch my breath. In that time, I was able to grow closer to my family, even more than before, and put everyone on a healthy regiment that they had sworn they’d start years ago. I was able to work out and meditate, improving myself in the way I’d insisted I had been doing.

But as is said in the cliché, people don’t change without the face of adversity; I experienced the same. With all that time spent at home, I watched many old Netflix shows and even started reading again. And I only really saw one thing. Carpe diem. Seize the day. Carpe diem. Seize the day. Would I have been okay just wasting in the heat doing nothing remarkable when the world paused for who knew how long?

I made a list of things that I had always wanted, no matter how ludicrous and where I was at. The gap between the two lists was the only obstacle I had to surmount. Two concrete goals I had were to be things I wasn’t yet. I wanted to be a writer since I was a child. I wanted to be an entrepreneur since my first year of college. So from there, my research began, and I began searching in online mirages for what could help me on my path and problems to solve and stories to tell. From starting to read again, I wrote an entire book with its own innate world and people. With a friend and my biomedical engineering knowledge, I pursued a social entrepreneurship challenge, which will hopefully one day become a startup. It felt good. It felt as if I were slowly jumping over the gap between the lists. Just by doing.  

With these two projects came another realization. That all we had was time, and even though it felt like the hours were paused, the future was coming fast, and already being in my 20s, I didn’t know if I could keep watching something pretty on the horizon without walking towards it.

In the sandstorm, sands always end up following the path gravity lays for them, but at the moment, I was suspended in the air for half a second. And I was able to choose where I wanted to fall.

I guess we all look for a sense of belonging in our communities. Especially on a college campus where we are first given our independence and now there is a plethora of people with each their own stories from which we try to choose the literary pieces in others that complement that within our own libraries. Continuing the metaphor, I guess I created a pretty great anthology these four years, but what stood out from this year compared to other years was that I had a pretty solid friend group rather than a collection of individual friends which I’d see.

Starting last semester with the onset of COVID-19 it became essential to restrict ourselves to a smaller social circle even on college campuses to prevent outbreaks and I guess with that came a new friend dynamic where we were able to collectively hang out as a group of five people. With a clique as such, it was nice to have a group of default friends where you could go and spend time with people you enjoy the company of and would choose to hang out with whenever you would like. Seeing each other on a day-to-day basis having very clashing personalities was an experience on its own and continues to be so through every argument, but I guess these come only with a closeness you get with your family outside of home.  

But because of this, I also got used to being around my circle at every given time, whether to study, travel, or by video calling, being alone became a novelty once again and the term “codependent” seemed to come up more and more. And from there my learning curve leading out of the hive mind began and as one of my friends suggested to go on an adventure on my own and do what our group loves doing best and experience the world but on my own this time. And so I began to take a step away from the crutches my friend group presented and took a few strides into Atlanta renewing an independence and continuing back on my individual adventure I started years ago.