growing up != no fun

fun is not a sin

earlier this week i took a group of admitted seventeen eighteen year old college students to eat lunch and it struck me how old i felt. how dinosaur i was next to them.

seeing the popular kids gravitate together, finding common ground in shared cities and majors, observing their not-so-casual flirting... is this what parenting is like?

it's the last few weeks of college now. feeling like a wrinkly prune among the newest harvest of prospective students is a telling sign of my concluding time here

it's been 5 years but these 5 years are like night and day.

i've made lists and lists of what i wished i've done while here. lists and lists of unaccomplished dreams, unfulfilled tasks. in these last few weeks, i squander every moment to cross those off. my eyes flitter through every bulletin board for unfulfilled missions, fill my evenings with student shows and free entertainment events. it's weird that it's only at the finish line do you realize what you missed in the journey.

i think about what could've been... ask myself what it would've been like if i just did this and that

i don't find peace with vacation and rest. perhaps it's the hustling spirit that my parents passed me. perhaps it's seeing my grandma always keeping herself busy.

my parents preached that if i wasn't studying harder, i'd be falling behind. slowness and enjoyment were a myth, i should constantly be studying. it was always finish studying then play. but at some point it was just study study study.

i'm slowly healing my ability to have fun. it's weird because having fun was always seen as 'wasting time.' when doing something for leisure or enjoyment the voice of my mom rings loudly in my head '浪费时间' (don’t waste your time) and '多学习' (study more). it's as if my mental army has to fight it hard enough to leave me a little bit of space for myself. when the voices are too strong, she's in full control. i go in autopilot.

i see so many of my friends fail to battle these voices. they give up their craft and creativity to work in consulting and tech just to stop their yapping moms from complaining about how disappointed they are in them.

many of them completely give up creative selves following graduation, hobbies reduced down to a ‘fun fact about me’ as they're chained to the obtuse angle of the sun.

i wish we could all be creative for fun. not the diluted version that exists within a system, but the raw unfiltered kind. the kind that jams on ideas at recess. the kind that isn't constrained by technology or shiny metals or blood-sucking monsters. not despite what our parents say, but because we want to. play the piano with a full heart. let the notes flow freely, let the music come to us.

steven dietz, playwright