"Coming-of-Age"

Now an average individual would interpret this phrase as a title referring to the specific growth associated with adolescence including the multitudes of struggles that come with it; however, the themes these narratives are usually underpinned by reflect a cycle of life experienced by a much broader age group — to the extent that it can be argued that it isn’t age-related at all. I’m confident everybody reading this right now has read or watched those repetitive — often cringe — storylines of teenagers who are subject to the atrocities occurring in high school life who somehow change or grow into more mature versions of themselves. Forgive me for rapidly diverging, but a connected experience I would like to illuminate is the audience consuming this media, often want a cognate, cinematic life — but I contend that it is virtually impossible to have a life resembling that shown in such media. Firstly, putting aside ordinary students spontaneously breaking into song, archetypal bullying, and undeniably unrealistic characters — I would like to introduce the concept I designate as the inflated significance interpreted out of ordinary events due to the time-bound nature of narratives. Put in simple terms — which is very much necessary after my preposterous slew of jargon — in cinema, you often see a freshman who falls deeply in love after seeing someone give them a pen, or help them carry their books after it mysteriously falls out of their lockers, and this benevolent action somehow triggers a perception so distorted to appear significant when pragmatically, a high school crush isn’t someone you exactly remember on your deathbed. We often desire such meaningful moments or ‘deep’ dialogues in our own lives but chances are, you’ve already experienced them, so many of them, in fact, that most of them disappear into obsolescence. In a 90-minute movie, giving a pen to someone feels like you have been struck by destiny itself, but — unless you are exorbitantly delusional — giving a girl a pen is just a regular act of kindness and unlike a musical, isn’t a dramatic cue of love. So yes, your life is a movie, so many movies that you forget the fifth by the time you’re on the twenty-sixth; can you blame yourself, though? That said, why don’t our lives feel like a movie? The answer is simple: because our lens is too broad. Look at every single motion picture ever saw, what do you notice? They end. Life, is not like that — but it can absolutely be reframed to feel like that. It is in fact, the quality that a movie ends that gives it cinematic value. If a movie was genuinely 80 years long, would you seriously remember the girl the character thought “was cute” from 76 years ago? Most of the scenes shown in cinema are not actually so alien that we never get to experience them. Record snippets of your life for 6 months and I’ll guarantee it’ll start to look like a very low-budget production. Bridging back to the actual claim, if you take the examples of the most quintessential coming-of-age narratives, you would notice that there is quite a broad pattern: the protagonist is still figuring out who they are. Take Charlie from The Perks of Being a Wallflower, or Neil Perry from Dead Poets Society; Neil is battling expectations for the sake of becoming an actor, and Charlie is overcoming his trauma. Now whilst this may seem exclusive to puberty, let me remind you, it is in fact not. Identity isn’t something built once or a progress bar completed by graduation. It is a constant fluid that has to adapt to the struggles life throws. Now for coming-of-age to be exclusive to adolescence, struggle itself would have to come to halt — and for that, life would have to stop changing. Now this connects back to the previous claim, life will, in reality, change so much that you can’t keep up, that’s the beauty! The nexus to Greek mythology emerges from this; particularly, the tale of Sisyphus. You can draw the parallel that Sisyphus being cursed to push a boulder up a steep hill endlessly is analogous to how we eminently pursue answers to our identity with no true destination. If we do not capitulate to the realisation that identity is a fluid body, then we will be disastrously discontent with ourselves; for Sisyphus was only described as happy once he conceded to a similar truth. Now let me ask you, what is life, if not change? You can be an engineer all your life and then decide to become a journalist; you can be lonely till you’re 45 and then you find the love of your life in a café; you can be a teenage runaway and have a surprising reconnect with your brother at 32. First, it’s high school, then it’s college, then it’s your first job, then it’s the breakup with the one person you thought was the one, then it’s the period of loneliness and mundanity you don’t know how to overcome, then it’s pivoting your whole career, then it’s finding the love of your life, then kids, then sending those kids to college, now tell me, do you really stop ‘coming-of-age’? Ultimately, it is up to you to choose whether to fear change, or to embrace it, and drive down the endless road of becoming yourself.