Changing lanes.

I was driving home in some traffic last night when I drifted, in my mind, a long way back (about 20 years) to high school. I was caught in one of those periodic traffic slowdowns as I floated back; you know, those waves of congestion that seem to pass backward through the columns of cars in each lane. (I've heard they start because someone switches lanes, and in response, a rippling emergent slowness travels backward and outward as the cars behind it accommodate the change, one by one.)

What drew me back to those younger days was that, back in high school, similar phenomena of congestion took place in the halls between classes, when eddies of young humans would get caught in and around those clumps of those chatting by lockers or retrieving books. Occasionally, backups would occur when groups of people got caught in these eddies, or collided with other groups by the lockers, and slowdowns would ripple back from there. Maybe it's not exactly the same, but as I drove it seemed similar enough.

What soon caught my attention, however, was how, in those simpler times, I was in an after-school club for making up words (peak literature nerd, I know) and we made up words for this phenomenon: A "corriclot" was any group traveling down the hall or stuck to the side at some lockers, and a "corriclog" was any backup caused when they glommed together. We were immensely clever, we were sure, but the terms never caught on.

Adulthood seems to have robbed me of that sort of innocence, I mused as I changed lanes on I-495. There was something so simple then that simply isn't the case now, it seems, and it's hard to put my finger on what's different. It used to be that my chief concerns in life included boys, grades, reading assignments, and whether a new word we'd made up was the right word for the occasion. Now, my chief concerns include boys, inflation, finding a better job, and whether I can make rent this month.

What changed? Is losing innocence simply about gaining responsibilities?

For all complexities of adulthood, there are also complexities of youth, so it may be unfair to say it's just about gaining responsibilities. Maybe the seeming loss of innocence—perhaps call it a loss of "naivete"—is really an accumulation of something else. Not just gaining responsibilities, but gathering experiences that change our perspective over time and ground life's complexities differently: We assess choices differently, see the consequences differently, and reach the respective outcomes differently, over time and with change. All those choices, consequences, and outcomes accumulate with us as we move through them, adding to us rather than necessarily taking away; the gradual accumulation of experiences changes our perspectives, however gradually, and what came before seems free and simple and innocent by comparison.

Despite the intervening lifetimes, the 20 years of mounting experiences, I hesitate to say I'm fully a different human, that all the constituent parts have been swapped out. In some ways, I'm still the same dweeb obsessed with words and cute guys, after all; the through line is difficult to see at times, but I suspect there's more than just numerical identity connecting me to that kid.

As a hopefully useful aside, I'm a firm believer that angst is relative—that factors like resilience and differences in perspective counter our angst and we experience it at the emotional level similarly, largely regardless of the circumstances. We feel just as hurt by heartbreak regardless of being well off in life or struggling; objectively, a person in the latter situation has it worse and it's less fair to add more hardship, but subjectively, the experience feels largely similar. Another example is someone who wins the lottery: At first, they're ecstatic or whatever, but eventually they return to feeling roughly normal about life, despite all the cash, as things otherwise balance back out. At the end of the day, humans are nonrational in their emotions and in their subjective experience of them.

So anyway, in the context of this blog post, maybe I have more in common with that kid than I realize. The frustrations of youth felt (at the time, at least) as real and significant as those I feel now in adulthood. My heartache over a crush or anger at a friend I'm arguing with or the disappointment at getting a bad grade (shudder to think) felt then as serious as worrying about rent now and so on. There, perhaps, it was lack of experience and perspective than resilience, but the angst then was subjectively relative to my circumstances. Perhaps the only difference in my responses to life's complexities now vs. then is how the accumulations of intervening lifetimes have colored my perspective. Perhaps I didn’t lose my innocence but gained experience, but—like changing lanes—I'm still in the same car, just in a different spot.

That said, I hesitate to say I miss that naivete or the simplicity of youth, tho; at least, not entirely. For one thing, I have certain freedoms in adulthood I couldn't have fathomed back when I made up words for fun with friends (another classic was "snizzle," to describe the sensation of an impending sneeze) and listened as they complained about AP Calculus. For example, it wasn't until I was fully out of college, gratefully employed, and idly sitting in my (then) new apartment that I realized I could just go to a nearby diner and get a burger basically whenever; I didn't need to find a ride first, or seriously worry about money, or feel restrained by an upcoming deadline or reading assignment for class.* I could just... go. Whenever I wanted. I can't quite explain why or how, but the revelation was mind blowing in the moment. And then I went to the diner and got that burger, perhaps to test the notion out, or perhaps because I was hungry, or perhaps both.

Image by Pexels from Pixabay

End notes

* You can tell that I was always (mostly) a "good boy." Arguably, still very much am. Mostly.