“Don’t wanna grow up, I wanna get out, take me away.”
That pepped up line blasts you in the ears with pop-rock electric guitar in the 2004 cult classic, Freaky Friday, starring Lindsay Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis. Rewatching that movie during quarantine made me fall in love with that song again . There’s nothing more relatable than wanting to stop growing up, stop time, live, and have fun.
Being in the COVID-19 pandemic for over a year made me realize two things: one, how ignorant some people are, and two, how fast time flies. Whenever I’m on a call with my friends or in the Google Meet classroom with my classmates, I always joke about how our teen years are being taken away. We laugh it off, talk about how things must’ve been if there was no COVID, who we would’ve been, what we’d be doing, or how school would be like. There is something so fun about talking about what could’ve been, to escape reality. Deep down, though, I know we’re just afraid to grow up.
I don’t want to grow upー well, at least not yet. I know I’ll get there someday, but now I just want to live in the moment.. Even though I’m afraid of it, I can’t deny I’ve grown so much from who I was before the pandemic. I went into the pandemic at 15, and in a few weeks I’m turning 17. It's crazy to me how fast the time went by! Am I still the person I was back in March 2020? Would I still have had the same interests? Probably not. I’ve grown from many things, interests, people, friends, and so much more. Without a doubt, the pandemic helped me be who I am today, and I like who I am today, but I’m clueless of who I’ll be in the next few years.
No matter how much we’re scared of it, growing up is something that all of us experience. When I was ten,I really wanted to be 16; and now that I am, I want to go back to when I was a kid, when I was carefree and younger. I want to go back to that feeling of freedom with no worries at all. Right now, it’s scary to think of the future. I rarely talk about it to anyone. Who will I be? What college will I go to? What course will I take? Will I regret the course that I will take? I have so many questions that I don’t have answers to, and I don’t plan on knowing until I get there.
Although it is a scary feeling, it also feels quite good. To look back on your life, your mistakes, your achievements ー it’s such a good feeling to know that you have grown out of the interests you don’t like anymore, the hobbies you’ve left, the friends you’ve grown from. And hey, I’m still young! There’s a lot more for me to experience, a lot more for me to grow from, and a lot more of my personality to develop. So let’s all hang in there longer, let's all live in the moment ーsafely, of courseーand let’s make out what we want our future to be.
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