Reflections at 21 years old

Recently I have been sorting through my childhood photo albums. This has led to some nostalgic reflections of both my childhood and my current self. Looking at these photos, it’s so tempting to wish I was back in my pink anorak, smiling through chubby cheeks at my mum behind the camera. I was so dependent on other people, I had no worries, no responsibility. It’s so easy, in my 21-year-old-recently-graduated-with-no-concrete-life-plans-brain to envy that little girl. I find myself missing the days we’d go to the seaside with my grandparents, play in the sand for hours, and wait expectantly for the time of day when my Grandma would give my sister and me a shiny one pound coin to spend at the sweet shop. To miss the days we’d go to Amerton Farm and ride the train, look at the animals, throw bread at ducks and geese. To miss the birthdays spent with my entire hoard of cousins, the photos of cakes being blown out by every infant at the gathering, opening presents and playing with them straight away. They are all such special memories, most of them I wouldn’t even know happened without them being captured on my mum’s ancient film camera.

I find myself yearning for simpler times, meanwhile I’m stood at the vast expanse of that scary thing called the Future. I’m a Gen-Z child, born in 1998, always told to go to university, a creative child, always writing, reading, making lists, playing story in the garden, pretending, imagining, being anything but me. Suddenly, I have decisions to make about myself, my own life, my own future, and I am confronted with myself for only the second time in my life. The first was during my A Levels. The question was what to study at university, and where to study. I had that horrible and yet fortunate thing of enjoying all of my classes and being interested in a lot of things. This, of course, meant I had absolutely no sense of direction or desired vocation at hand. I went for English Literature because I enjoyed it the most, and it fit my personality the most really. It was always the homework I started first, the lesson I never dreaded (unless it was Chaucer). Now I’ve reached those crossroads again, the one with a plethora of roads leading away into a haze of possibilities and the unknown. I have so many aspects of myself, of my interests, of my talents, that I don’t know what to do with. I am trying to locate that part in me that is excited for the future, for the unknown, the possibilities, but it’s hard. I can’t be the only one feeling like this. 

All I know is, looking back at these memories, these trips, these special moments, I am so grateful for all that has come before. I was raised by people who cared about me, who made my childhood an interesting, special, recorded one, and they continue to create memories with me to this day. Once again I find myself drawn back to a Jandy Nelson quote from The Sky Is Everywhere: “It’s such a colossal effort not to be haunted by what’s lost, but to be enchanted by what was.” 

I’m trying, I’m really trying.

 

Ellen Victoria