AT EIGHTEEN

At eighteen, I thought that my life would finally swing into rapid action, taking a detour from the ordinary and begin advancing in a manner in which I wanted it to. At eighteen, I thought, that a driver’s license would finally take up that coveted position in my wallet right next to my very first credit card (!). At eighteen, I thought I had finally fulfilled all principal duties of a school going ‘kid’, and could now sit back and soak in newly found independent status. Freedom, however, I soon learned was a purely theoretical concept. While it is mostly relative, one can’t deny except in a few cases, it is almost completely deceptive. Freedom (I was enlightened) was that lucrative carrot that your benefactors (read parents) dangled at the end of the stick when they wanted you to work your ass off (no pun intended!) at something.
So while you keep fooling yourselves and flashing your ‘I’m finally free’ tagline, back it up a minute and think about what you really wanted and what you actually got. Have you rid yourselves of the ‘I –told-you- so’s’ and ‘don’t think you are old enough to give me advice’ and the ’who do you keep talking to”s and ah! my personal favorite, ’If I were you, I would have done it by now….’.And heaven forbid, if you do turn out to be right in one of these unfortunate encounters, you’ve had it ! Being wrong, or even slightly so is what hits authority where it hurts the most. So tremendous is the outbreak of that torrential rage, so intense is its consequence, that it leaves you reeling and gasping, only to fall headfirst into another ‘grave’ situation, carefully covered up until the last moment, when it became too late, and you had to take that plunge.
And so while they plan and plot, we sit and rot, for they’ve tied us down with chains of protective autocracy.” YOU can run but you can never hide, from the shadow that’s creeping up beside you…” Def Lepard puts it well into context for hundreds of eighteen year olds like yours truly, ailing from the age old disease of ‘virtual freedom’. Do forgive me for being a tad cynical. I started out as an out right optimist, progressed to a visionary idealist, believing every minute that that which is mine would not be denied. I was wrong. Horribly so. That is when my slow descent snow-balled into a landslide and was reduced first to a realist and then the ill- fated, hardcore cynic.
In middle school, I once read a poem which went something like”…children should be seen and not heard.....” or something to that effect. I was pretty sure that it definitely entailed children not being heard, for that is truer than the sun –rises –in –the –east and the blood-thicker-than-water and other such universally unadventurous facts. While this sudden outburst of teenage angst may lead you to think that it just a bad case of pms, believe you me, I feel this way every two milliseconds, like thousands of my brethren.
Because really, I wasn’t “born to be wild”, but if you must insist, I shall not be ‘another brick in the wall’.