the changing tides
My best friend graduated from college last week, and I asked if he felt a shift, some permanent change that signified he could no longer go back to being a child. For some years, it was almost a ritual for us to send each other a half-panicked, half-illuminated text that read: Shit, we’re becoming adults. Now I wonder if this is the time when we stop becoming. Does the transition from childhood to adulthood happen in a single action, an overnight change of anxieties from midterm scores to employment, or is it years of repeated uncertainty, vigor, and obscurity drawn out from ages sixteen to twenty-one?
I start my senior year of college in a few days. With so much on my plate — internship, undergraduate research, board exams, and post-grad scholarship applications — one would assume there’s little to no space left in my calendar to be anxious about the after. Yet, it still seeps into the empty pockets between one action and the next. The nagging demand to write the prelude to the next chapter when this one isn’t even finished yet hammers in my head.
Growing up feels like such an impossible task. I wonder how anyone has gone through it unscathed, or at least without regrets of things they should’ve done instead of the ones they’ve already chosen.
In the rare moments of idleness, I find myself browsing through rental ads around the region. But should I even move out fresh out of college, with barely any savings and four years of return service remaining? Should I find roommates? Or just get a cat? It goes on and on until I realize that I’ve spent a couple of hours just bathing in my anxieties. Perhaps spiraling is a side effect of adulthood.
Change comes with so much chaos and divergence from routines you’ve held onto for years. As if the millennia of evolution that enabled you, me, all of us, to stand and breathe together at the same time weren’t enough evidence that adaptation is a necessity in life, I had to learn it in the form of faded high school friendships and job interviews. How can one be welcoming of new relationships and opportunities while still grieving old friends and could-have-beens from a decade ago? How does one move forward while constantly looking back?
I will graduate from college a year from now. This moment marks the beginning of an end, and next year I’ll have no excuse. While it could span decades or overlap ambiguously through different ages, childhood at some point stops. This letter will not conclude in a thesis, because I myself can only think and plan and worry, but never know for sure what’s on the other side of the door unless I step through it. Perhaps around the same time next year, I’ll know. By then, I’ll be able to write about it.
This piece was originally posted on Substack on July 29, 2024 and migrated to BearBlog on March 19, 2026.