At Eighteen...
- Zarah Hashim
- Sep 14
- 3 min read
My limited time on this planet has been spent on the drug and disease that is comparison – my 19 (almost 20!) years have been fixated on what I can improve. As I prepare to leave teenagehood and the liminal space that 19 encompasses, I reminisce on times gone by and what the future holds.
We’re told from infancy that at 18 years of age we are officially adults– how exciting! Yet I feel as though that big legacy we someday hope to inherit is unfulfilling and over-exaggerated. 18 is the year we graduate from college, ready to take on our next stage. For me that was university. At 18 I felt on top of the world, knowing I was now an ‘’adult’’... but what does it mean to be an adult? How do we define this label placed upon us?
‘Adult’ as a noun sucks away my youth and the very essence of my being. All these terms: baby, child, preteen, teenager, adult – what do they do for our souls? The reason 19 feels liminal, almost like it doesn't exist is because, just like 17, we are waiting for the next stage.
In my search for life’s meaning I found elements of an answer to my questions through my English degree and its insight into the Romantic poets and their philosophy. Their rejection of this rigid way of life, so confined to both legal and social laws, truly resonates with how life should be lived, right? I find comfort in the knowledge that our descent into capitalism and global corruption was not the only imagined future.
There is a legacy of revolution against structural ideologies which impede on life's simplest pleasures and gifts. A little hedonism in life does not seem at all bad when at 18 I am told I am an adult; at 18 I can get a full-time job and pay taxes; at 18 I can vote in a system where there feels to be no clear future; at 18 I am told I am free; but it feels true freedom has never existed. At 18, the weight of the world is placed upon my shoulders and suddenly I feel like Atlas, punished to carry the heavens and the sky for eternity. Hence the escapist philosophies of the Romantics, to seek life out in the pastoral and find beauty in a sublime mystic.
These realities are seldom spoken about when at 6, 10, and 16, adults (ironically), speak on adulthood. Their omission of what 18 feels like and what it actually is reflects how we all deny our fears. Even as adults, they revere the false legacy of 18 and pass that lie onto the future.
These false truths combined with the harsh reality, have led me to seek out a future of joy, pleasure and beauty. What is this life worth if not living it to the fullest? My social circle, consisting of some of the most amazing people I have ever met, allows me to lead my life this way. Almost 2 years into adulthood and I have managed to escape the falsehood that is ‘freedom’. I am free because I have a choice and being able to choose is the essence of freedom.
We all have a choice to accept what we want as, ultimately, it will be me and only me in the end. So, I choose to accept that life is not about what responsibilities I have, or what change I can make in the world. The pressure of becoming like Atlas strips you of the beauty that is your life, more specifically your youth. My goal in a world full of falsehoods is to leave satisfied that I know I did everything I wanted to. My legacy won't be that at 18 you're free, it will be that you can live in spite of what the world tells you.
Edited by Hania Ahmed
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