Last week, I turned 19, and now there’s nothing to do.
(Well, in comparison to last year, there’s nothing to do. Last year, I turned 18 right around this time, and I was blown away by the various dramatic external changes that my new age brought into the year that followed. It was impossible to be unaware and unaffected by the social and societal access points and opportunities offered to the 18-year-old, as well as the losses and challenges that also come with such a formative milestone.
I turned 18 and I became a legal adult. I moved away from my hometown for the first time and went to college. I lost the ability to be admitted for free to my favorite museum—although it seems that being 5-foot-4 has yet to stop me from riding certain kiddie-coasters. I became eligible to be drafted into the military, I legally gambled at an Indian casino, I worried about my credit score after a fender-bender and, for the briefest of moments, I pictured my first tattoo.
Two weeks ago, as an 18-year-old, I exercised my civic rights and voted for the first time in the presidential primary.
Two weeks later, on March 20, 2016, I turned 19. And now the most notable accompaniment to my age is a Steely Dan song about old men hitting on insignificant, uncultured 19-year-old sorority girls who hadn’t even heard of Aretha Franklin.
Because I lost that ground-breaking status of being 18, I’ve struggled to give this 19th birthday the same kind of significance that the outside world placed upon March 20, 2015, and the 364 days that followed, which included an acceptance letter to Duke University, a goodbye to my parents and a room-service binge worthy of a Project X remake in my first legally-unsupervised hotel room.
Because the age of 21 has lost its potency—mostly due to the undeniable fact that a large population of minors now carry two sets of identification—18 has been designated, for almost all of our generation, as the most important year of existence. Maybe that’ll change when I turn 30. The point is that the world that follows “life at 18”—the lesser sequel that is “life at 19”—feels quite uneventful, and pretty damn lackluster. I’ve even told myself that I would “live like I’m 20 as a 19-year-old,” hoping to skip over the feeling of 19 in order to live in the mindset of a more potent age.
It’s only been a week, and I am scrambled to absorb anything from 19. I’m not transferring schools, I’m not becoming a “more-legal” adult and I’m not going to gamble away $200 playing Fortune Pai Gow poker at the Palm Springs Morongo Casino again. I quickly grew tired of looking up the phrase “what can 19-year-olds do” and reading stories about dull Vegas trips or the decision to un-declare as a pre-med.
Desperate, I abandoned government websites and parenting blogs, trying a different channel. I went Old Testament and a little mathematical, all with the typical overextension and over-examination of the world that is characteristic of the English major.
19. Really, it’s just an unpleasant, awkward, “almost” number: it’s almost perfectly rounded—but not like the aesthetically pleasing 20; it’s almost even, and it’s almost the end of one’s childhood, but that happened 12 months ago at 18, and it feels miles away from being the satisfying “20” that marks the end of one’s teenage years.
So rather than examine the world of 19 in isolation, I got to thinking about the meaning of 19 in the context of its consecutive positioning to the already-meaningful 18.
In Hebrew, 18 translates to chai, which means “life.” Yet, when I turned 18, I wasn’t given life. I was given the key to accessing the full breadth of opportunities that might allow me to to reach my potential, to pinpoint my dreams and begin the hard work of turning them into a reality. I’d been living just fine for 17 years before I turned 18. And, if 18 is merely some vague sort of Hebraic gift of life, I don’t think that means that 19 is the afterlife.
19, in fact, is the first year living the “life” that 18 signified. It’s the age after the age when everything changed. As a 19-year-old, I’ve found myself to be settling in to the differences that were officially introduced to my 18-year-old self. And though the gravity and crucial benchmark of 18 can’t be downplayed, I’ve begun to see where 19 fits into my personal narrative as, in a way, it may turn out to be an even more vital age than 18.
It’s my responsibility as a 19-year-old to build upon the dynamic and sudden developments that come with turning and being 18. If 18 designates the beginning of the rest of my life, in which I must actively evolve and consciously improve without age-marked milestones, then 19 marks the first chance at living it well. The first year of getting better at being the me that I turned when I was 18. Chai doesn’t mean “life” and 18 in a purely transitive sense; 18 is the merely the platform from which life might first begin to gain its greatest meaning. And that starts at 19.
So I come back to Steely Dan and listen to “Hey Nineteen.” Rethinking it, I was harsh on those girls I called “insignificant.” They weren’t anything like that. They were just 19. And it seems that the 19-year-old Gamma Chi girl, even if she “don’t remember the Queen of Soul,” has a lot more life to build on than the geezer who can’t get laid.)
Jackson Prince is a Trinity freshman. His column runs on alternate Tuesdays.
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