“When I was 10 years old, I was rich. I was an aristocrat, and all I thought about was art and music. Now I’m 36, and all I think about is money.”
This quote from My Dinner with Andre, that popped up on my social media feed, has stuck with me for a few years now, but I was unable to grasp why it struck me. Reflecting now, it has subconsciously navigated my understanding of going into young adulthood.
When I was young, community was always there. In the playground with my friends, at the breakfast table with family, and in basketball games after school. During the beginning of my college time, however, when the quarantine took place for me, it vanished. I was alone in my room doing homework, seeing amorphous profiles in a classroom on a screen, and responding to bot-like copy-and-pasted discussion posts on Canvas. It was isolating, and the only person I would see for days was the one being reflected on the black screen of my phone when I was ready to go to sleep. There was no place to connect with others to make art, to play games, to even study with, and it served as an epiphany that this is what adulthood would be like if I did not actively create something that would bring me to the connection of others. And I was right.
Graduating alone during the tail end of the Pandemic a couple of years later, I had an office job. I’d wake up, go to work, and come back at 5 to have a show that served to fill the silence in the background while I was busy being hypnotized by scrolling on social media imagining what it would be like to have a prosperous life like those I followed had. Again and again for weeks, this was my life to the point that the voices of others served only to be my Charlie Brown trombone buzzing. The only thing I thought about was my paycheck, and my mental health was going down.
I did not realize just how important the ability to connect with others was. Being in school was one of the only times in which I had a semblance of automatic community built into my daily life. Now I came to the understanding that after leaving it, you have to willingly build it yourself from the ground up.
Going through that life during and after quarantine, I felt that I received a premonition of what life would look like at 36, if I kept on the way I was. The situation that the entire world was forced into for about three years gave me a head start to the world I might have in the future if I continued to reserve myself to my home. That quote from My Dinner with Andre served as a wake up call in a sense: that if I don’t do the things to foster a healthy life now, I won’t have it there for me when I get older. I didn’t want to live a life of regret and “what ifs.” Currently, I am more active in my own life, choosing to get healthier, choosing to foster connections, engaging in my community, and pursuing higher education.
The TV character BMO from Adventure Time asks, “But does growing up just change your body? Or also… your soul?” The outside and inward forces that had me think about life as an airport moving walkway, just slowly drifting into different stages, changed my soul from one of curiosity and childlike wonder, to that of a dull drone as I entered the stage of young adulthood. To answer BMO’s question, I say growing up can change your soul if you willingly let it. You have to have the agency to get off the moving walkway and make your own path filled with art, music, and love. That is something that I want to do, and will do, as I’ve seen the destination for that walkway and want to go to a different terminal.
