In a local cafe, I was writing an essay when they appeared: three teenage girls with tightly kinked curls and bright green, star-shaped pimple patches on their foreheads.
Next to my table, they posed in front of a blank white wall for portraits (been there). They snapped photos, huddled together to analyze every detail, laughed, then fell back into their seats to scroll Instagram and sort out their homework.
Was I in The Twilight Zone? Their teenage tendencies felt so nostalgic but strangely foreign to me, like I had been their age a lifetime ago.
“I am officially old,” I thought. When did this happen?
As I opened a new document to start writing this piece, I realized that oftentimes we spend so much of our time imagining the future, or even working towards it, that we forget to honor our quiet transformations happening in real time.
Distracted by the busyness of daily life, we seldom acknowledge these moments that show us we are already becoming who we once hoped to be.
Watching them transported me back to my 16-year-old self, when I fantasized about who I wanted to become and ached to grow up. I couldn’t wait for my life to start.
Now I’m 22 and on the other side of the coin. I’m applying to law school, gearing up to graduate from college and, in many ways, becoming the woman I envisioned.
One of my favorite poets, Walt Whitman, explores identity formation in his lengthy but brilliant poem “Song of Myself.” His famous line reads, “I am large, I contain multitudes.”
To me, Whitman describes how the self is always in motion. We are forever evolving, yet never abandoning the earlier versions of ourselves, our multitudes. Who I was at 16, like those girls in the cafe, lived within me at 18 and 2o, and still lives within me now.
In the same stanza as his famous line, Whitman adds: “The past and present wilt — I have fill’d them, empti’d them, And proceed to fill my next fold of the future.”
So sure, our past has “wilted,” but time reminds us how special it is to watch ourselves mature into the people we used to look up to. While we carry multitudes, we have so many more versions to become.
Because one day, we’ll find ourselves in a cafe as a group of college students walk in to study. They’ll order lattes, open their laptops and slip on their headphones. And we’ll remember, with a kind of tender nostalgia, what it felt like to be 22.
Kaylee Monahan is the Copy and Opinions Editor for The Beacon. She can be reached at monahan26@up.edu.
Have something to say about this? We’re dedicated to publishing a wide variety of viewpoints, and we’d like to hear from you. Voice your opinion in The Beacon.
