The world has collectively reached a consensus that most things are not as frightening the second time around. Whether it’s a root canal or bungee jumping off a cliff, we seem to have decided that the second time, it’s not quite the same heart-wrenching terror. Well, I’m here to tell you that like most consensus the world has collectively arrived at, this one makes no sense. Growing up, I think, might be one a prime example of something that’s even scarier when you have to do it twice. Another example might be falling in love, but frankly, I know nothing about that, so perhaps it’s something somebody else will have to write an article about.
Six months at uni. Global catastrophe. Home again, for fourteen months at least. And now…back to the life you were meant to be living. How do you leave a nest you’ve technically already left? How do you learn to be an adult all over again, stuttering at the parts you’d just barely gotten the hang of the first time around? Some may say that it’s a blessing, a second chance to do-over everything you feel you got wrong. But seeing it that way only shines light on how many things you feel need a do-over: that’s the only shtick growing up has, isn’t it? Messing up? Others may try to look at it in a more gentle, self-caring way: understand that this may be difficult, and try to look at it as a new set of challenges. And then the little voice, which I’m sure many students have heard whisper to them over the past twelve months of zoom classes, whispers again: Is this set of challenges even worth challenging? How I laugh now at the number of congratulations I was given, accompanied with the constant phrase: “These will be the best four years of your life!”
But the greatest obstacle is something that should have been obvious to us all from the first line: this isn’t growing up a second time. This is stepping back into a life that was razed to the ground by a pandemic, a gaping hole where nearly two years of it once stood, hoping the rickety stilts keep it standing. This combines the mundanity of the familiar with the fear of change, and what a double whammy that has turned out to be. Frankly, I have no idea what my second trip to Wonderland will bring, and I can barely see through the distortions of this looking-glass.
{{/usCountry}}But the greatest obstacle is something that should have been obvious to us all from the first line: this isn’t growing up a second time. This is stepping back into a life that was razed to the ground by a pandemic, a gaping hole where nearly two years of it once stood, hoping the rickety stilts keep it standing. This combines the mundanity of the familiar with the fear of change, and what a double whammy that has turned out to be. Frankly, I have no idea what my second trip to Wonderland will bring, and I can barely see through the distortions of this looking-glass.
{{/usCountry}}However, if nothing else, it has given me a chance to understand, to contemplate the things most people wait till a mid-life crisis to notice. When I look in the mirror, what do I want the face staring back at me to say? If I only have two years left, how can I play my cards so that I don’t waste a second of them? If the world isn’t what it used to be, how can I make sure that I’m not who I used to be, either?
Yes, it will be a blessing to go out into the world again, to see people from closer than six feet away, to finally sit with a bunch of my friends on a grassy lawn like in the college brochures. But it will be an act of far greater courage than it was the first time. The first time, I was full of the thrill, of the adventure, of the naivete. Now, I am full of trepidation, a hesitant eagerness, and the deep-rooted knowledge that I am, as I have been for the last two years, swimming against the current.
In returning to a world so shaken, we are all going where no one has gone before. And there is terror in that, certainly, just as there is comfort in staying within a self-made bunker that’s warm and comfortable and predictable. But there is a promise in that as well: a promise of hope. No more than that; not hope fulfilled, certainly. But a promise of hope. And perhaps, in days like ours, the promise of new hope is worth swimming against the current for.
From HT Brunch, May 23, 2021
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