This blog post brought to you by the number 19 and the letters SOS.
First of all, how are we supposed to label nineteen year olds? You're an adult at eighteen, but you stop being a teenager at twenty? And most people define adulthood as being over twenty-one, so if you're nineteen or twenty you're just screwed. Can't even call yourself a "young adult" because that's how people refer to like eighth graders.
I'm not stupid, I know adulthood is sort of abstract and it depends on unquantifiable things like maturity, but sometimes I just want to slap a label on something and be done with it, you know?
Nineteen is also one of those non-special birthdays (like 10, 13, 16, 18, 21, etc). Nothing changes, no new activities become legal (or illegal) due to the number of laps you've taken around the sun. Which is why it came as such a surprise to me that being nineteen is kind of a big deal. A lot of people, both celebrities and people close to me, did "the thing" that set their lives in motion when they were my age. I know I moved to Arizona and stuff but that was passive. I didn't invent new technology or create some inspiring piece of media or meet the love of my life or anything like that.
The cool thing is I still have about three months left of this "prime" age (ha ha ha), so if I'm supposed to do something big I have time. Unfortunately, I have no idea what that would be. The problem is that there isn't this One Thing that I'm really good at and passionate about. I have like ten different hobbies and I'm fairly good at all of them, but that doesn't mean anything.
I'm not sure if this is universal, but I've always felt too old. I remember being eleven and watching home movies, thinking that I would give anything to go back to being a toddler. I think I had my first mid life crisis at age thirteen. It was intense. I had been seriously studying theater at my school for the arts, and everything pointed to the fact that I should have started sooner. I'm pretty sure I had been watching a lot of Shirley Temple movies, and they were not helping. I had friends who were already successful in the arts: friends who were print models, had small parts in movies, things like that. I looked at their work and then back at mine (which consisted wholly of school plays) and was crushed. Eventually I did a few small ads, and a little TV (five episodes of a hokey show Fox aired on Saturday mornings to teach teens about bad decisions), but I was still woefully behind where I felt I should have been, so I stopped all together.
On the other hand, I know I'm young, relatively. One thing that makes me feel better is knowing that if I ever get a Wikipedia page, my entire life so far wouldn't be on it. Look up anyone who isn't a child star and it begins with the college they graduated from. I'm still under the "Early Life" tab (though if I did have a mid life crisis at thirteen, I've only got seven years left). The other thing is that usually when people do "The Thing", they don't know it's happening while they're doing it. When my parents met each other at nineteen, they had no idea they'd eventually get married. Nineteen year old Carrie Fisher couldn't have known that Star Wars would take off the way it did. And I'm sure nobody was patting Bill Gates on the back when he dropped out of Harvard his sophomore year.
So I'm left with a large amount of inspiration and no idea what to do with it. It's a frustrating cocktail of passion, confusion, self-doubt that I'm still figuring out how to drink (which is still illegal for another two years).
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