On Being Nineteen
1977, New Jersey (Photo: Steven Taylor)
“There’s a whole world that doesn’t exist any longer-that’s just what time does. It takes things away from you” ~ Sigrid Nunez
Novelist Sigrid Nunez captures well this facet of getting older with relation to time. It passes. We lose things. There is some brain science around the idea that nostalgia is seductive because it reminds us of our sense of self or our identity over time. So if you’re very old, you might see change (the future) as threatening while the past appears more stable, even though that past no longer exists.
A couple of years ago I reconnected with an old friend who eventually found this picture he had taken of me at nineteen. I’d never seen it before. It startled me to see this young version of myself as I have only one other photo from this period of my life. One. Contrast that with the modern mania of capturing every experience on a phone. No one took photos in those days of course, unless you were a serious photographer with a heavy piece of equipment around your neck. Photos evoke memories. When we look at ourselves in old photos, the memories that come up are usually around where we were and with whom? What was I doing? Not How was I feeling? Who did I think I was at that age? Can a photograph evoke that? This photograph was taken in one of the most formative years of my life. Despite constantly forgetting these days where I put down my glasses, my long term memory remains relatively intact. I remember this nineteen year old well. She felt on the verge of everything.
Most of the young people I know (including my own son) are already a decade beyond this youngster that from my vantage point now, seems like a mere child, even though in my heart I felt nothing like a child then. Or was trying hard not to. I was newly navigating adulthood, courting and experiencing all the things one needs to form a life on that shaky road: love, friendships, adventure, education, heartbreak and even danger.
A few years before college and armed with mostly defiance and a sense of adventure, at age 18 I left home with two childhood friends carrying an excitement I can still feel viscerally, just as clearly as I can see my mother standing in the doorway of my childhood home. She was waving goodbye and looking about as bewildered and concerned as any mother in those days who didn’t understand her teenage daughter would.
Living on my own with a revolving door of roommates on the York River in Virginia with thousands of acres of state park behind our house and animals that ran wild, in 1977 we didn’t even have a house phone. Friends would show up, winding down that tree-lined roller-coaster road, often annoyed that they’d driven fifteen miles out of town to find no one home. We were unapologetic. We felt lucky. An old man neighbor when I saw him, used to comment that we lived in “God’s country”. Whenever he said it I would momentarily become a believer. That river was a steady friend and I discovered the intimacy that a river affords that is different from other bodies of water. I spent many contemplative hours on the cliffs there, watching the river run from that very high perch, the loons diving like darts into the sunlit ripples. Our rent for this idyllic setting was a cool $85 for a three bedroom house that we paid for monthly in cash.
I felt in charge of my life then; self-possessed in the face of all the uncertainty and craziness of youth. It occurs to me that those of us from my generation who ventured into the world in order to find it—and thereby ourselves— did so without much information. In the dark ages of the 60’ s and 70’s, most of us had little access to it outside of three television stations, (which we didn’t have either) a National Geographic subscription and possession of a library card. Unlike current teenagers, not much actually came to us in the passive way it does today through social media. We had to go and find it. Usually in a book. Or by the seat of our pants. There was no marketing outside of newspapers and magazines. We had handbills and word of mouth to learn about band performances and various happenings. I think the by-product of this “lack” was that my tribe and I developed fearlessness. We leapt into our lives. What we didn’t know couldn’t hurt us (even though it sometimes did). I didn’t have a plan, but barreled through my young life accumulating experiences and putting out fires along the way.
On the cusp of becoming an artist, I worked flexible restaurant and bar hours, slinging drinks and Greek food in a university town that suited my temperament at the time. The staff consisted of students, artists, writers, musicians, and self-styled philosophers. It was a meeting place of cerebral, but wild and irreverent characters. This mixture of interesting creative and academic types contrasted nicely with the quirkier personalities of the locals. I felt like I’d landed on another planet from where I’d grown up. The south felt friendlier than the north. There was a slowness, time to amble through lots of gorgeous nature, people with whom to bounce ideas around, discussion and debate. And no Google to muddy the waters. No thought police.
Instead, there was a serious intellectual crowd that lined my path then that I considered part of my education. The air was thick with deep talk, poetry, dreams and drugs. I must have certainly been going through an existential phase when I recall my reading list in those days: Colette, Flaubert, Anais Nin, Sartre, Emerson, Henry Miller, D.H.Lawrence, along with various Buddhist and eastern philosophy texts. Are there any 19 year olds that willingly tackle such sober authors these days? In any case, I’m sure most of these would now be considered irrelevant but at the time opened up many doorways of thinking for me. I have no idea what young people are reading, or if they are. I hope so. But screens have long taken over; yet another world (the one with books) goes missing.
My “bohemian” life didn’t feel bohemian at the time. I certainly didn’t label it as that and my experience was not that much different from many people I know from my generation. I was just out in the real world, collecting experiences—both euphoric and horrific—as fodder for art. By contrast, younger generations seem saddled with a lot of college debt and anxiety about their lives and professions, amplified by cyber-bullies, world violence, climate fears, identity and mental health navigation. I ache for them. Even with the major cultural shifts of the time, my peers and I had little of that. Quite the opposite. I felt a profound sense of freedom. Of course, not being on constant news alert from the internet helped our cause. For myself, I had a certain naiveté —that would be virtually impossible now— about the world that I think served me. It taught me to trust. In books. In art. In wonder. That was the way to find a life. And to trust in that as well.
The world of my young adulthood doesn’t exist any longer. And it’s not sad. It’s simply the way things are; the way life moves. Every generation has its own experience. In any case, labeling the past as “better days” is inherently dangerous and misguided.
I am currently in the middle of Miranda July’s deeply layered (and hilarious) novel, All Fours ,where I keep finding relatable insights. July’s character notes that when we are young, so much of what you thought was you was maybe really, other people. How do we become? Growing up, I was labeled a sad child early on, always being prompted to smile. I don’t remember feeling particularly sad, but I was always thinking deeply about stuff so maybe that showed on my resting-lost-in-thought-face. I think that label imprinted on me in a way and shaped my outlook as I got older though. In other words, I learned about myself (accurate or not) through other people, as July implies.
We expose ourselves to the world. We spend our lives saying yes to this, no to that, weeding out our joys and revulsions along the way to form the basis of who we are. We become ourselves by absorption of what is in our particular air and to what degree. I’m grateful for coming of age in the pre-digital era when the world felt a little quieter; the characters and experiences that led me to becoming. Even though that world is gone, my past will always belong to me. I know the pieces of that nineteen year old I still keep.