To Being Young

We are young, we run free

Stay up late, we don’t sleep

Got our friends, got the night

We’ll be alright.

I have no idea why but I’ve been hooked to this song for the past two days now. One of the reasons could be my fast approaching birthday. Come Monday I will be celebrating my 19^th and last teen birthday. With all my friends rushing into their twenties I am one of the few left behind in their teens.

One of my friends told me how our lives would have changed completely by the end of this decade. We’ll be earning, have a house of our own, some of us will be married and some might also have kids. But I suppose the decade that passed by has been equally life changing.

Teenage, what crazy years they have been!

From being silly at 13, bratty at 14, queer when 15 (not just by appearance), a little excited about 16, growing wild in 17 and 18 and finally a little grown up by 19. I am sure it might’ve been different for everyone but mostly by the time we reach the big twenty we all have some sense knocked into us.

We've all quite literally evolved in this decade from being little monkeys to young adults. It has changed us enough to look back at our old pictures and videos and feel nostalgic and highly embarrassed at times. All those old school pictures with friends and teachers, the annual and sports day videos that our parents took with great excitement, the certificates that brought so much pleasure and report cards of school that we laugh at now had been a source of continual terror back then, I realize we’ve all come a long way.

If anyone ever came and told me in my high school that I would one day laugh at the various tactics of telling my marks to mom or showing my dad a diary note then I would’ve thought that the person is simply pulling my leg or being very rude.

Though now when I recall certain incidents from school I do wonder why, had I been that stupid.

At times we did something which made us feel how grown up we were and could never understand why our parents found that so funny. Well now I do know why they found it funny because coming home with a traffic policeman because the bus driver left you behind was hardly sensible, nor was adding salt to an extra sugary tea an example of quick thinking. But those were pre-teens when we did not take offence for being laughed at.

And as we moved into our teens it was sort of in vogue to argue with Mom and Dad on every single topic under the sun. Even if at the end of the argument we don’t get our way through we simply had to defy whatever they had to say. By the time we reached the last few years of high school we were convinced that our parents had a lot of catching up to do.

And suddenly when we made it to college as freshmen and had absolutely no idea about how things worked outside school, Mom and Dad gained back all the sense of superiority because well we were back to being the youngest. 

I am a little excited, a little nervous, a tiny bit scared and every bit confused about the years ahead of me. I just hope that a decade later I will be able to laugh at the years gone by and say
 “What an idiot I’ve been”.

Because if I manage that I’d know I’ve had some memorable times.