Words by Vanessa S Miranda
Image by Dana Trippe
Before us the world had a pattern, a way for people to guide themselves by, a north on the compass. My generation lost that…and in my late twenties I start to wonder the good that came out of it. Before me, everyone was supposed to get out of college, find a job, meet someone and get married and by their thirties have a baby…this was the plan and if you diverted from it questions would start to flood. Nowadays society has changed in such a large scale that none of us can keep up with this plan, nor do we want to. I find myself contemplating my life and my friends…I see that our jobs are not secure long-lasting ones, our houses are rent and not bought, marriage slides to second or third plan facing the costs of it and babies are not even a discussed topic.
We gain freedom, we gain more control over who we are and what we want to do and we afford ourselves to live the lives of our dreams or keep chasing it… but did we lost something along the way? Did we forget to really grow-up? Are we just postponing that moment? And what makes an adult? A number on the birth certificate? Buying a house and living independently from our parents? Starting a family of our own?
We live freely and we stretch the sweet recklessness of our youth to the maximum but is there moment in our lives that the weight of our age catches up with our dreams? Are we just constrained by social and economic values or are we living the way we wanted to? Is youth such a glorious phase?
I am still wondering but I think we gain more than we lost…we are at this point free to dispose of our lives as we see fit and nothing seems righter than that. The coming of age happens when you are prepared for it to happen, not when age or society deems fit.
