By Kiera Wiatrak
of the Chronicle staff
I don’t think anyone really ever expects to grow up. You emerge from the womb as a child and are stuck with that youthful label for seemingly forever.
Everyone around you always talks about “when you grow up” as though it were a hopeful prospect but not a probable one, as if you had to travel through an abyss to get there.
To a child, there are two types of people in the world, adults and children, and the roles are permanent. Adulthood is always directly in front of you, but you must cross eternity before you can reach it.
But then each school year starts feeling half the length of the one before. Adults stop pinching your cheeks. People in the mall ask if you’d like to change cell phone plans.
Soon enough, you’re staring into the eyes of winter break of senior year and you forget all of that. All that matters now is that you’re leaving home in less than nine months.
I think it was my 18th birthday that did it for me. That morning I looked in the mirror and realized that everything I saw was, for the first time and forever more, mine.
Born to that liberation, to my parents’ horror, was my nose piercing. It was my nose now; I could mutilate it if I saw reason to do so.
Beginning that day, I focused on observing parents and children. Children, to me, seemed like an appendage of their parents. They came out of their parents, therefore they were obliged to become property of their inventors.
This 18-year journey includes rewards, punishments, lessons in ethics and morals and so many questions. These questions and finding their answers within themselves, I believe, are what essentially allow children eventually to become their own people. This is what I had done, and to me it was a beautiful and natural endeavor.
Lack of knowing
Breaking away is a heart-wrenching experience in that there’s so much ahead but you must leave so much behind. The simple act of lighting the Chanukah menorah this year, eight nights in a row, unexpectedly touched a nerve in me.
I’ll probably light a menorah next year, but who knows for sure where I’ll be? I certainly don’t.
And even if I do light a menorah, it won’t be with my family. There’ll be an eerie emptiness posed between my brother and my sister where I normally stand for our traditional Chanukah photo.
If I return home for the High Holidays, what will it feel like? What will be the ambiance in the home that had guided me to become a self-guiding adult with a new home?
I can’t imagine. For the first time in my life, I can’t form preconceptions that I’ve become dependent on for my own security.
During a ski-trip in Colorado several years ago, I stood on the peak of an un-groomed, rocky and mogul-covered hill. Although I had never skied this particular run, it resembled others I had skied in form and intensity.
Because of this and because my vision was unimpaired straight through to the bottom, I wasn’t scared. I stood there for several minutes, plotting my path down the hill, every bump, every turn. And I skied it flawlessly, a promised reward to careful planning and an eviction of surprises. I wouldn’t budge from my viewing spot until I knew exactly what I was in for.
But what happens when you can’t see to the bottom? What happens when you can’t see anything at all?
A friend recently told me that this lack of knowing was probably what made us feel so grown up this year. I think this is what marks the end of our adolescence.
I’ve dreamt of a recurring theme at frequent intervals since the beginning of junior year: the first night in college. We don’t think of college in terms of time, we think of the experience as its own entity, one condensed package. We’re taught to consider college from the perspectives of the adults that have already been there, like a memory.
Memories are an all-at-once ordeal. It doesn’t take four years to indulge in a memory. As a result, pending attendees expect college immediately to consume them and spit them back out just as abruptly when it’s over.
But as we get older and the departing day draws closer, we realize that time is a limitation of college. There will be a transitional period. Therefore, I wonder about the awkwardness of the first night.
I will be in a foreign place that I’m supposed to grow to love with a stranger snoring across the room, whom I will probably grow to hate, not knowing who or what I may encounter the following morning.
I will have no niche at this point, and I will inevitably toss and turn with the conscious burden and pressures of having to develop a new life for myself.
Being a natural dreamer, I’ve attempted on many occasions to fathom every aspect of me one year from now. But my logical side knows that was and will continue to be futile, and the most healthy and mature thing to do at this point would be to say, “I’ll figure it out when I get there.”
Kiera Wiatrak is an intern with The Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle and a senior at Nicolet High School.
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