Eighteen
T-Wolf (he/him/his, she/her/hers)
Editorial Team Member
When I realized the brink of adulthood was approaching, the first thing I wanted to do was buy a cupcake.
It wouldn’t be hard, in my current living arrangement. Since I live on a college campus, many stores, restaurants, and libraries are a short walk away from my dorm. One happens to be a place called Molly’s Cupcakes. As soon as I realized my birthday would be around the corner, I had the perfect plan of stopping by there and buying myself one mega-sized, center-filled cupcake of my choosing. A look at the menu of the store showed well over three dozen different options of customized cupcake flavors I could order for my big day: caramel apple, creme brulee, orange creamsicle, key lime pie, you name it. As of the moment I write this, I have my final decision narrowed down to lemon raspberry, chocolate raspberry, or peach cobbler. Only on that special day will I know which it ends up being. If they somehow have none of those flavors available, I may just cry instead.
Not really. But it remains entertaining to rotate the many options of what cupcake I’ll buy around my mind. It’s also quite a menial decision, compared to everything else that supposedly comes with turning eighteen years old in the United States. I’ll be able to cast a ballot in my country, my state, and my city. I’ll have the chance to be an organ or blood donor. I’ll also need to apply for credit cards, be on the lookout for random jury duty selection, and worry about scanning legal contracts extra closely without my parents' signatures. And most importantly, I will finally be able to get my own fabled Costco membership card. Even if I’d use it for nothing but their free samples, it’s the thought that counts.
At the same time, so little changes. I’m still going to be attending college miles away from the rest of my family. I’m still going to be working on several writing projects at once. I’m still going to hate that one required English class that, really, I should have had the proper credits to be able to skip, because I have still not heard nor read a single noteworthy thing in that course since the semester began. Once a few more papers are scanned and signed and forgotten, what’s truly changed? Once I’m a couple bucks poorer and a mega-sized cupcake richer, what’s truly different?
I suppose I count myself lucky for once then, that the largest shifts in my life do not have to come all at once like many other teenagers around my age and situation. I was still a minor when I was dropped into college last fall, trying to navigate my way about a new campus and adjust to dorm life. In comparison to my seventeenth birthday, my eighteenth will be insignificant to me in every sense but the legal. I will feel so plainly normal, fingers crossed, by the end of the day.
And after a childhood spent academically shooting myself through one overachieving hoop after another, a normal day is the best way I could hope to end it. I’ll still very much be a bit of a child at heart; I doubt that anyone that makes it to eighteen isn’t- but I’ve spent so long thinking I’d never reach a point where I could let myself have such simple pleasures in life. I’ve struggled with figuring out the in-betweens of adult, kid, and adolescent ever since I’ve reached the teens. And I’m still in them and in that struggle.
But hopefully, that struggle can be a little sweeter that day. A little more lemon-filled, or raspberry-filled, or peach-filled. And I’ll enjoy my first taste of being eighteen.