My stigma with age continues and I, the ‘troubled non-teen’ return (last time time around I wrote this).
I will be 22 in a few months time now. I have finished my graduation and am at an important crossroads of my life with impending career decisions to make. The future is as clear as the proverbial London sky and I am worried. I set out to solve the various issues and a strong undercurrent makes it presence felt. I try and channelize the innumerable questions that are circulating in my head and what I have captured below seems no more than a trailer.
What is being an adult?
I am growing older by the numbers and responsibilities and duties in life arise every day. But I don’t feel any older. I don’t feel 21 or 22. I feel the same in spirit as I was when I just started out engineering at 18. So what exactly is being an adult is what I am waiting to find out. Is there always a change? An expected variation in behaviour, choices made, outlook to life. From the gloomy picture they paint of adulthood I have a bleak paranoid image of a more restrained, careful, moderate and dispassionate lifestyle. But I am having more fun and adventure than ever before with lesser supervision and more wisdom. So why exactly is this troublesome? Am I feeling this or is there really a demon lurking in the background with a wicked smile and glint in the ruby red eye that says you will know soon?
What is being old?
Why is it that people first size you up according to your age and only then by your talents and experience? Is it because of the masses? The majority of the population ages and metamorphosise in more or less the same manner at different agestones on the road of life and so they say. But aren’t are all our paths distinct and aren’t we diverse with different responses to similar stimuli, different skills and varied experiences? Even though the numbers say ‘old wine tastes better’, haven’t we witnessed enough examples of the younger surpassing the older in whatever criterion there is to measure success.
The learned have piles of experience accumulated and the vast amount of knowledge inherited often has a flaw of carrying forward existing shortcomings and woes. The novice has an advantage of a blank slate encouraging newer construction and novel perspectives. But the novice can go wrong for lacking the wisdom of the learned. Maybe there is no hard and fast rule as to who is better. So why can’t we abandon the practices of eras bygone and adopt meritocracy and social equality where young and old are equally respected and valued based on their skill over their wrinkles?
Of age and adulthood
The Unconscious Castaway
I am a lonely person. Not in the sense that I don’t have enough friends, am an outcast or don’t enjoy society! But that I spend most of my time alone. I have quite a circle of friends and love parties and meeting new people. Yet the time on hand far outweighs that spent in social grooming. College (of all the ones I had to join MJ) was just an extended vacation and now that graduation is done and I feel no different! I spend most of that time locked up in my room (and a secret lab that opens through a hidden door) cut off from the world. Paradoxically sitting there all I am doing is trying to decrypt and understand the world and its peoples with all the samples and data I got. There are days that I am hardly at home and there are days I don’t leave it at all. I forever ride this sinusoidal wave of alternating social over exposure and isolation. I love the company and I rejoice the time I spend alone learning and thinking and reflecting. It all fits in the natural cycle but there are times I have gone overboard and this is the tale of one horrid such instance.
After travelling to new places and states (read ADI and GNC in Guj and CST/MCT etc in Mah) in guise of attending interview for a B-school I return home. I stay there as there was no need to go to college or anywhere else. No immediate tasks to be undertaken or duties to be performed. With nothing to really get me out of my lethargical existence I was stuck in my room as if stranded on a ship with everything for survival except for other people. In that frightening stretch of 10 days there was minimal interaction with the external world. So what was I doing in that 200 sq ft of land? I was stuck in Seattle watching it rain outside the hospital all the time. Er? Yeah! I was watching Grey’s Anatomy for heaven sake! 72 episodes in 8 days! Watching straight 9 hours of bold and beautiful in a hospital everyday has that effect of transforming your reality. TV series are addictive and I was watching it even after it jumped the shark when McDreamy and Meredith broke up again! This was no exception; I began to have dreams involving those characters. (First it was Lost, then House and Prison Break, now this, next what?) Well Grey’s anatomy experience wasn’t new. But what followed was.
The ten days of self imposed social exile had an overbearing consequence. I had temporarily lost my social bearing and my social skills were jammed akin to radio signals or something. I started to notice the overbearing fits I put out when a task had to be done outside my premises. I was nervous when there was company and hence began to dread it due to my incapability of functioning well. I was claustrophobic when people were at a close proximity. I was intimidated by public places and scared of open expanses. I even didn’t have anything to say to people I knew very well and when I did say something it would turn out to be awfully wrong and embarrassing or insulting. Yet I braved all the danger and struggled on to return to normal. I did so soon and eventually it was like it never happened and the temporary scars on my personality gone but in my memory they remain.
