Lesley Brey
Staff Writer
Plenty has been said about what it means to “grow up.”
The author Edna St. Vincent Millay famously wrote that “[c]hildhood is not from birth to a certain age and at that certain age the child is grown and puts away childish things.”
In these dull quarantine days and even now, busy with classwork, I find myself wondering: when was the last day I played pretend with my friends, never to do it again? When was the last time my mother set me down, never to pick me up again? At what point did my day-to-day concerns evolve from who I would sit with at lunch to how I would pay my car insurance bill?
Most pointedly, at what age was I no longer asked what I wanted to be when I grew up?
This experience is nearly universal in the United States which seems to have a fixation upon becoming an adult. Every year, the line of adulthood seems to encroach further into the world of childhood, meanwhile, countless millennials wring their hands, trying to find the best self-help book on the topic of “adulting.”
There are bills to pay, jobs to do and very serious things that need to be accomplished.
In the realm of the adult, stopping to smell the flowers is something you have to pay for.
The successful adult is the one who owns the largest house, fastest car and can pay for the fancy meal subscription boxes where they ship all the ingredients right to your door.
It would seem that becoming an adult is a very serious affair and yet I can’t quite recall when exactly it happened. I certainly pay my bills, in fact, I work two jobs to do so. I go grocery shopping on the weekends, pushing my cart instead of riding in it, and when I go to the dentist, I go alone. However, none of this is to say that I’ve actually crossed through the veil and emerged on the other side a completed adult.
When no one else is around I swing on the swing set at the park across the street. I still eat Fruity-Pebbles for breakfast. I listen to the same emo music I did in middle school and when no one’s looking, I doodle story ideas in my class notes. It doesn’t seem that at my core I’ve changed much from childhood. I heard once that being an adult was realizing that no one knows what they’re doing and that we’re all making it up as we go along.
Intrigued by this, I set out to ask students at Idaho State University a question they probably hadn’t heard for a long time: What do you want to be when you grow up?
“I have no idea, that’s super scary!” said Idaho State sophomore Betty Wynn. “I love my major, I love studying it, but I don’t super know what I want to do with it.”
“I want to be a physical therapist but I also want to be a mom,” said freshman Sister Olsen.
“I would like to be a medical social worker. I’ve always been interested in [it], my mom has breast cancer, so I’ve always gone with her to the cancer center, so I’ve gotten to know the medical social worker there. That sparked my interest and that’s why I want to work in that field,” said senior Jasmine Bruahaze.
“I want to be a marketing manager at a big technology corporation or eventually own my own business. It’s just something that’s always been interesting to me, being my own boss,” said graduate student Javiar Martinez.
“I want to be a lawyer. I would like to focus on international law, specifically something to do with human rights,” said junior Jaylynn Aliev.
“I want to be a geriatric nurse practitioner. I always wanted to be a nurse, then I realized that I was interested in the elderly population,” said sophomore Grace Forsgrin.
In talking with the different students, I was a little downhearted that no one wanted to be an astronaut or a princess, but I suppose that proves they have earned the badge of adulthood requiring practical and well thought out careers. Though that isn’t to say that choosing a career is a joyless endeavor. Each student had a vested interest in their field which motivated them towards its pursuit. I wonder if I had had the chance to ask the same question to each person 10 years ago, how different their answer would be. But perhaps more intriguing, I wonder how their answers will change in the next 10 years.
I think I side with Antoine de Saint-Exupery when he said in “The Little Prince” that “adults are very, very strange.”
