Growing Up

I ran across this quote, on the blog Slaughterhouse 90210, that I like, particularly in combination with the image that it's paired with on the blog (link is here):

“Even under the best of circumstances, there’s just something so damn tragic about growing up.”
— Jonathan Tropper, This Is Where I Leave You


In part, it seems, the tragedy comes with the loss and letting go that accompanies growing up. You let go of who you thought you'd be and what you hoped your life would be like and come to accept who and what you are. You lose things, sometimes you lose people, and there's pain along the way. Of course there's also joy and happiness and elation, but I think any kind of metamorphosis always involves a difficult process of transformation and reckoning.

I was thinking about this after re-reading Joan Didion's essay "Goodbye to All That," in which she describes how she fell in love with New York City at age 20 and fell out of love with it at age 28. In the essay, NYC is a stand-in for, I think, youth and coming of age. She fell out of love with NYC when she grew up and moved from one phase of her life to the next. By 28, I think, NYC reminded her of the tragedy inherent in growing up.




She writes:

"I first saw New York when I was twenty, and it was summertime, and I got off a DC-7 at the old Idlewild temporary terminal in a new dress which had seemed very smart in Sacramento but seemed less smart already, even in the old Idlewild temporary terminal, and the warm air smelled of mildew and some instinct, programmed by all the movies I had ever seen and all the stories I had ever read and all the songs I had ever heard sung about New York, informed me that it would never be quite the same again. In fact it never was."

I wonder why that is.  Is it because, as Milan Kundera says, "In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine." Or: "The Greek word for 'return' is nostos. Algos means 'suffering.' So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return." That nostalgia causes us to return to a certain originating moment and it seems that the "before" moment was the true moment and the one that changed everything that followed and you can never get it back. And growing up -- as the loss of contact with that "before" moment can then seem kind of tragic because it involves loss.

She later writes, after explaining how she could see what she thought was the Brooklyn Bridge from her hotel window when she first moved to NYC, only she later learned that the bridge was Triborough: "In retrospect it seems to me that those days before I knew the names of all the bridges were happier  than the ones that came later." I wonder why the before, the anticipation, can feel better than the after. I think maybe it's because the space of potential and imagination often feels ... preferable to the reality. Reality doesn't turn out to be the way you thought it would be and so the "before," before you knew the truth of how things are, can retain a sense of innocence that you can't recover.

Didion writes:

I was in love with New York. I mean I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and you never love anyone quite that way again. I remember walking across Sixty-Second Street one twilight that first spring, or the second spring, they were all alike for awhile. I was late to meet someone but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out of the West and reached the mirage. I could taste the peach and feel the soft air blowing from a subway grating on my legs and I could smell lilac and garbage and expensive perfume and I knew that it would cost something sooner or later because I did not belong there, did not come from there but when you are twenty-two or twenty-three, you figure that later you will have a high emotional balance, and be able to pay whatever it costs. I still believed in possibilities then, still had the sense, so peculiar to New York, that something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day, any month. I was making only $65 or $70 a week then.... I never told my father I needed money because then he would have sent it, and I would never know if I could do it myself. At that time making a living seemed a game to me, with arbitrary but quite inflexible rules.... I never felt poor, I had the feeling that if I needed money I could always get it. I could write a syndicated column for teenagers under the name Debbi Lynn or I could smuggle gold into India or I could become a $100 call girl, and none of it would matter.


Nothing was irrevocable; everything was within reach.... I could make promises to myself and to other people and there would be all the time in the world to keep them. I could stay up all night and make mistakes, and none of them would count.

I suppose that a lot of us who have been very young in New York have the same scenes in our home screens. I remember sitting in a lot of apartments with a slight headache at about five o'clock in the morning. I had a friend who could not sleep, and he knew a few other people who had the same trouble, and we would watch the sky lighten and have a last drink with no ice and then go home in the early morning, when the streets were clean and wet (had it rained in the night? we never knew) and the few cruising taxis still had their headlights on and the only color was the red and green of traffic signals. The White Rose bars opened very early in the morning; I recall waiting in one of them to watch an astronaut go into space, waiting so long that at the moment it actually happened I had my eyes not on the television but on a cockroach on the tile floor. I liked the bleak branches above Washington Square at dawn, and the monochromatic flatness of Second Avenue, the fire escapes and the grilled storefronts peculiar and empty in their perspective.

By the time she turned 28, Didion began to fall out of love with the city. She writes:

That was the year, my twenty-eight, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every word, all of it.... All I mean is that I was very young in New York, and that at some point the golden rhythm was broken, and I am not that young anymore.

 I have taught this essay in English composition courses twice and both times students seemed to universally find the essay's theme relatable. I guess when you are younger the future contains all possibilities and there is an experience of endlessness, lightness. A sense that time and space are so vast that there are no serious consequences. A sense that almost everything represents potential. There can be a sense that of course you will read every book, travel to every country, have every experience, fall in love with person after person after person. At least that's how it was for me. And then as you grow older, life narrows. You discover that things are much different than you had thought, that there is more weight than you had realized. "That not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every word, all of it." That learning -- about how life works, how choices and consequences work, how goals are realized --  is good and allows for growth and wisdom, but that learning also hurts.