Playing Grown-up

At Harvard, we play grown-up.

For four years we masquerade as 40-year-olds trapped in barely post-pubescent bodies. Some of us play socialites. We don floppy hats and seersucker suits and sip bloody marys in the garden of the Fly, mimicking the day when the country club lawn will be larger and the guest list more exclusive. Some of us play CEOs. We run our extracurriculars like corporations, fueling cutthroat competition and politicking, priming ourselves for the Forbes 500 with a premature sense of self-importance. Some of us play politicians. We hobnob at the Institute of Politics and recruit our friends to manage our bids for the Undergraduate Council, imagining some not so distant future when our names will grace campaign signs instead of problem sets. Still others of us play academics, activists, artisans, the avant-garde. We fashion the world that we inhabit in the image of an adult world we’d like to know.

I played this game with the best of them. As I marched through the calendar months from 1998 to 2002, I learned the rules, I acted the part.

And yet as I approached graduation day, that mythical dividing line between the fantasy of maturity and the reality, I still felt decidedly unadultlike.

Then, the last day of spring break, my first best friend died, and all of a sudden I felt a lot older.

Amanda was three months my senior. For the six years of my childhood that I spent in Denver she lived around the corner, close enough to be a near constant companion but just far away enough that I could display a playground boastfulness about being allowed to walk to her house alone. Her bedroom window faced mine across the alley and on summer nights we used to whisper through walkie-talkies long after our parents had put us to bed. Amanda was with me the first time I had a sleepover, the first time I was allowed to walk to school alone, the first time I took a leap into the deep end of a swimming pool.

I moved from Denver to Florida when I was 10 and, as with most of my childhood friends, Amanda and I gradually lost touch.

But in April, when Amanda finally succumbed to a two-year battle with cancer, I felt an immeasurable sense of loss. Not the kind you feel upon losing grasp of something you had been holding near and close, but rather the kind you feel upon losing grasp of something distant, something at the edges of your consciousness, but yet something that forms a fundamental part of who you are.

Without Amanda, there were whole chunks of my past that now resided only in my memory, that would never again be brought back to life through a common recollection, a mutual understanding, a shared nostalgic laugh.

It struck me then that becoming an adult is not just about gaining—the real club, the real job, the real name in lights. It’s also about losing.

In some ways, for some of us, it’s about losing people who hold some part of our history that no other person does—a romance, an intellectual discovery, a frightening leap into the deep end of a pool.

But for all of us it’s about losing the license to be young, to be whimsical, naive, unabashedly free from responsibility. These are liberties that over the past four years we have not perhaps appreciated, these are liberties we have perhaps given up to soon.

The expectations change when we graduate. With all the surprise and shock of a plunge into cool and unfamiliar waters; we will be expected to stop playing adults and start being them. Our four years of practice will be put to the test—either leaving us satisfied at our thorough preparation or utterly amused at how off-target our role playing was. But either way, our adultness will no longer be voluntary, but rather mandatory; the burdens of our responsibilities will be real, and unlike our current costumes we will no be able to shed them whenever they become too heavy or uncomfortable or tight.

Yet even if we have to start being adults, nothing is to say we can’t start playing children. After all, we have learned nothing at Harvard if not how to masquerade. Maybe, if we push aside our egos and our anxieties, we can allow ourselves to don a new set of costumes, even if only for an hour, an afternoon, a day. In these looser garments we just might be able to reclaim our sense of awe and wonder, our carefree abandon, our willingness to jump blindly into unknown waters below. And, while we can never recapture those people who through death or distance have left us forever, we may, for a fleeting moment, recapture the feelings we shared with them. In this passing instant we may get back some of what we’ve lost.

Lauren E. Baer ’02, a social studies concentrator in Dunster House, was an associate editorial chair of The Crimson in 2001.