Surprise: You're an Adult

"Can I go to the bathroom?" asked a 17-year-old boy from Georgia. I assumed he was talking to Mrs. Harris, my high school poetry teacher, so I ignored him. When he repeated the question I looked around a little wildly before saying of course he could.

This experience was a little jolting. After all, I spend a significant amount of time dreading my impending "adulthood," which entails getting a steady job and buying life insurance and wallpaper. As a sophomore I'm already contemplating which fellowships I could get so as to stave off being a grown up for a few more years. Therefore imagine my shock when the participants at this year's annual Harvard Model United Nations (HMUN) conference, only a few years younger than myself, readily treated me like a grown up. I tried to inform them of their gross mistake. I purposefully dressed more casually. I sat on the floor Indian-style. I even sang horrible Backstreet Boys songs to show I was hip. All this posturing to no avail. The kids were convinced. At first I chalked it up to their own over-eagerness. As the dust settled, however, I realized that I was the one who was mistaken. In fact, every Harvard student who still believes that they are the same fun-loving slacker they were in high school is also mistaken. Ladies and gentlemen: we've all grown up, we just haven't realized it yet.

We are old enough to choose the President, to fight and die for our country, to buy cigarettes and pornography. Student organizations run national events like "Evening with Champions." Let's Go--written and published exclusively by Harvard students--is the number one budget travel series in America. Every year selected theses are deemed worthy additions to the body of knowledge. In light of these accomplishments of organization, commitment and intelligence, the campus-wide preoccupation with not becoming adults--which I share--seems delusional. We're already doing all the things that adults do.

Even if you're not a student who treats their extra-curriculars or their school work like a job and even if you don't spend 70 hours a week at the Advocate, Phillips Brooks House or Cabot library, you're still an adult. Want proof? When you're in a book store, do you shop at the "young adult" section? When you sign an official document does your guardian have to sign it also? When you go away for the weekend, do you have to call your mother and tell her you got in safely? Are there name tags sewn in all your clothes? Have you thought about the PSATs recently? Do you and your friends dress exactly alike?

"Being old" doesn't mean that you have to use crutches when you walk to the bathroom or that your idea of a fantastic time is bingo night at the community center. If you're old enough to dread growing up, odds are you already have. After all, Peter Pan, the classic fantasty about a boy who never grows up, was written by a nostaligic old man. The dread of adulthood and the idealization of childhood into a utopian never-never-land is a phenomenon only adults can experience.

J. M. Barrie, the author of Peter Pan, imagined that being a kid was a fun-filled time, with little responsibility or worry, where the only requirement was to enjoy yourself and to kill pirates and frolic with mermaids. If he were actually a kid, however, he would have realized how unpleasant it is. In reality, kids have little personal freedom and even less privacy. Their lives are constantly regulated by their parents in the form of curfews and dress codes and scrutinized by their peers--ew, where did you like, dig up that outfit? Those who resent the authoritarian aspects of Harvard's administration would do well to remember the absolutism of high school regulations, which included uniforms, rules against public displays of affection, bans on beepers, requirements to use only transparent bookbags and educational requirements that make the core system seem like ultimate liberty.

The popular image of grown ups is just as flawed as that of J. M. Barrie. Some people picture grown ups as though they're eternally trapped by mortgage payments, income taxes, marriage, alimony and/or dead end jobs. Adults seem to have less freedom than kids. Grown ups are like pin balls whose trajectories are defined by a series of obstacles that bounce them in a meaningless direction. After shooting out of college at high speed you slam into a four-figure monthly rent and you careen towards a career in I-banking. You're hit by 90-hour weeks, you fizzle out, lose steam, and drop into law school. There you bump into a nice guy, slide into marriage and emerge from law school with an infant child, student loans, the need to buy a house--so you become an analyst.

The problem with this view is that our heroine's life ends at approximately age 30. That's the point when the honeymoon stops and boredom sets in. However, if you talk to any person over 30--clearly an adult--you'll realize that, incredibly, they don't feel old at all! A little confused you'll ask them who, then, is a bona fide adult. His answer: "my parents." We are old, we just haven't and probably never will fully realize it.

A conversation somewhere in Georgia:

"Hey dude, how was the HMUN conference?"

"Oh great! Except there was this one really weird staffer who kept on talking to me and acting like she was my age. It was really annoying."

"Oh God, I hate it when adults do that!"

"Yeah, me too."

Christina S. Lewis '02 is a history and literature concentrator in Leverett House. Her column appears on alternate Mondays.