Creatures from the underworld

Last week, my friend and I volunteered our time to bake cookies at the Ronald McDonald House with pediatric cancer patients and their families.

We masterfully put our pre-made cubes of break-and-bake dough in the oven and then had some time to chat with the kids (10-13 minutes or until the cookies were golden brown, to be exact).

At first we began with the typical "What's your name? How old are you? Do you know that people actually used to bake cookies from scratch back in our day?" until one little seven-year-old girl engaged us in a fascinating dialogue. It went like this:

"Are you teenagers?"

(My friend and I looked at each other.) "No."

"Are you adults?"

(My friend and I looked at each other, horrified.) "No."

"Are you moms?"

Ouch....

After a seven-year old classified me as a demon sent from hell, I went home that night wondering: What was I? What are college students? I returned to my room, listened to Britney Spears' "I'm Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman" on repeat, and thought long and hard about the issue.

College students exist in a very peculiar limbo between childhood and adulthood. We have been ejected from the parental nest, but have yet to actually spread our wings in the real world. Is this awkward in-between phase good or bad?

On the one hand, this is one of two times in our lives when we have the maximum amount of rights with the minimum amount of responsibilities. The only other time this happens is after retirement when your children are grown and out of the house, but then you also have hip replacements and liver spots.

As college students, we are at the peak of physical health, and we get to drive, drink, vote, buy porn and basically do whatever our hearts desire. Furthermore, we are responsible for no one else's well-being but our own (not that we shouldn't try to take care of the people in our lives, but it's not like we have children depending on us.)

The freedom that college students have is astonishing. We can choose to go to class or not, we can stay out all night without answering to anyone, we can eat whatever we want with our DukeCards, and if we have a car, we could literally go on a road trip at the drop of a hat to wherever we damn well please.

It is paradise. The world is our oyster, and we can afford to eat it on food points.

However, what so many people don't realize is that it can be incredibly hard stuck in this in-between phase. We are old enough to take ourselves seriously, but young enough that others don't. Furthermore, the amount of freedom we have can be terrifying. The fact that our lives could literally go anywhere from here is sometimes paralyzing.

The smallest decisions we make now will permanently influence the trajectory of our lives. We are like ships launching from the harbor, and if we are even one degree off course, we could end up on the wrong continent. We have to worry about how the majors we haven't chosen will influence the jobs we haven't gotten in the cities we haven't moved to where our future spouses who we haven't met yet live.

There is imbued in us a constant need to strive and to move on to the next step and the next step. While it is exciting to hop from high school student to college student to employee to spouse to parent, it is exhausting. Each rung we climb on the ladder only reminds us of how far we have yet to go, and how far we could possibly fall.

While college is the time most people look back on as their fondest years, in a way, there is something very bittersweet about it. There is something almost pathetic about the way we live our lives, like watching little children playing house.

We shack up with our boyfriends and girlfriends, but aren't married to them. We work at internships during the summer, but don't have careers. We build friendships, but most won't last past our four years. These are our awkward, half-assed attempts at life that train us for the real thing. And when the real thing hits us, all we want is to have those training wheels back on.

Maybe my seven-year-old friend was right; maybe we are creatures from the underworld. We are damned if we remain children, and we are damned if we grow up too fast.

Stacy Chudwin is a Trinity junior. Her column runs every other Thursday.