(17, CA, USA) Carly - 2025
The number 2025 has haunted me for 17 years. To most, 2025 is nothing more than a number. However, 2025 has tainted my thoughts for years, quickly typed in before my last name 5 days a week 36 weeks a year. In those early, bittersweet days, 2025 seemed like a simply unreachable date; a far off moment in the future that I would never truly reach. Yet suddenly, it is 2024 and 2025 is no longer a mere figment of my imagination. 2025 is real, and approaching at an unfathomable rate. I fondly remember the days where all I wished for was to grow up. My childhood was filled with moments where I dreamed of teenage cliches: being able to drive, going to high school dances, gaining independence in my life. However, the fantasies of my youth did not consider the independence of childhood. The independence from the burden of growing expectations, the lack of care regarding physical appearance, the freedom from intellectual demand. I so desperately wanted to grow up in my youth, yet my childhood self would be shocked to see how I would give anything to experience the incomparable serendipity of my childhood one more time. Although in childhood I longed to age faster, I now find myself irrevocably afraid of growing up. 18 is a looming age, a new stage of life: Adulthood. I wonder, how can I be nearing adulthood when I still feel stuck in an adolescent mind? I find myself constantly looking back, and although it is cliche, wondering where the time has gone. It feels as if years have gone by in minutes, and the memories of not only my childhood, but also my adolescence, are beginning to fade. I am scared, I’ll admit it. I am afraid to be on my own, I am fearful of leaving behind the life I have always known. I am scared to be bold, scared to take risks. I am terrified to grow up, to no longer be a child. However, life does not pause for your fears. No matter how desperately you attempt to hang back, to hold onto your childhood, time keeps going. The clock does not stop ticking, and it never will. There is a somewhat of a beauty in that, the conquering of a great fear whilst still in the midst of it. I am afraid to grow up, yet it is happening even as I write these words. It is impossible for me to stop it, hence I have realized the only thing to do is embrace it. Growing up is scary, but is also beautiful and a privilege. While I admire childhood, I also persist to achieve the future that my childhood self dreamed of. I will achieve the brightness and liveliness of her future, I will become the woman that she fantasized. That childhood optimism lies within me, and although memories fade and flicker, the same soul, the same heart of my childhood, rests within me, patiently waiting to be rediscovered.
