A close friend confessed something to me recently.  “When I first met you,” he began, harkening back to the beginning of his freshman year, “I was like, ‘Why is this kid so stressed out all the time?’”  I chuckled.  I used to be wary when someone called me “kid,” probably because of flashbacks to a condescending flag football coach (or any number of childhood authority figures) who belittled me so much that I still think about it to this day.  I was often told, “Don’t talk back.”  And I was often bothered by being told that.  Don’t talk back?  Don’t have a conversation?  Don’t I deserve to understand?  The Oxford English Dictionary defines “back-talk” as the following: “To talk back to a person, esp. in an insolent manner.”  I never intended insolence; I was a child, and I didn’t even know what the word meant.  Even asking what back-talk meant would be considered back-talk.

 

     Why is this kid so stressed out all the time?  Because the second he starts to feel overwhelmed, he still feels like he’s being belittled by the world.  Halfway through each of my high school semesters, I would remember the organizational scheme I’d established at the start of the year and wonder when it had spontaneously combusted along the way.  Then, I would quickly convince myself that I didn’t have time to think about the answer.  Don’t talk back.  Keep chugging along.  It’s time to play catch-up, kid.  I’d always assumed that when you became an adult you understood everything; you got some sort of special glasses that allowed you to see the world in a new way and make sense of it.  But, unless my package was lost in the mail, no such optical upgrade exists.

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     “Why is this kid so stressed out all the time?”  My friend wondered this at age eighteen, just starting his first semester of college.  “Now,” he continued his confession at age nineteen, finishing his second semester, “I understand you.”  I chuckled, and I didn’t mind being called “kid.”  Maybe that’s the true mark of adulthood, understanding that everyone is a kid.  “Astronomers have determined that our universe is 13.7 billion years old,” according to press.princeton.edu — the first result of my Google search.  From age one, to age twenty-one, to age one hundred, we’re all kinda kids.  And that’s okay.  Our bodies will never be able to catch up with the cosmos.  But our minds will always be able to choose what we do with that knowledge.  Why is this kid so stressed out all the time?  Because he’s a kid, and that’s okay.  So, here’s to what I couldn’t catch up with.  Here’s to choosing to do our best with what we’re given.