Welcome to my last first post on a blog in a Uni English class! Although I know it is obnoxious, I can't really contain my joy that I'm almost done with high school...so I apologize for my need to remind everyone of that basically all the time. Anyway, I really enjoyed the discussion about coming of age and what it means that we started in class on Friday. Like I said in class, I've started thinking a lot about coming of age over the past year and a half or so and it is kind of consuming me. The idea of coming of age is weird because it is supposed to be a period of transition, a time during which you change who you are as a person. We usually associate it with the teenage years, although the arbitrary ending point of this transition is becoming older and older. However, it never seems to get younger. No one (or at least I don't) thinks that middle schoolers or kindergarteners are coming of age, but aren't they transitioning, too? I remember in preschool and kindergarten, all I wanted was to watch the Disney princess movies. My parents never showed me "Bambi" or "Little Mermaid" or even "Cinderella." To be honest, I still haven't seen any of those movies. When I was that age, my thoughts were almost completely devoted to playing with my imaginary friend, Window, learning how to walk on the beam in gymnastics class, and mimicking whatever my older brother did. 5 years later, I knew Window wasn't real and had forgotten the fun we used to have together, I was considering quitting gymnastics, and my goal in life was to make sure my parents knew every single thing my brother did to annoy me. Clearly, I went through a big change during that time and came out with different likes and dislikes, new relationships, and a more realistic outlook on life. That is exactly the sort of change that is supposed to happen during the period of coming of age, and yet that transition during my childhood is not considered coming of age, and that kind of confuses me. I think it would be cool if I wrote a post at the end of this course that revisits the question of how coming of age is different than transitional periods of childhood and compared my ideas now to my ideas then. I anticipate that I will change a lot mentally and emotionally after reading and thinking about other people's coming of age stories, so stay tuned...
P.S. Sorry for the lack of capitalization in my title, but I wasn't sure if "with" and "off" were supposed to be capitalized or not, so I just didn't capitalize any of it... :)
I think it's really hard to pin point a person's coming of age moment because there can be so many. As you said, we can associate a lot of points in our lives as coming of age. Such as Preschool (first time going to school), 6th grade (first time in middle school), or freshman in either high school or college. Each of these provide a different transition experience, which in turn just makes it difficult to single out any of them as someone's coming of age moment. I can see why people don't see kindergardeners or middle schoolers as people who have come of age because I suppose they (usually) haven't really figured out their lives by then. Yes, like you, they could have significant changes in their likes, dislikes, and personalities, but I wouldn't consider that transition the pivotal coming of age in our lives that we will be discussing this year.
ReplyDelete(I'd say "Off" would be capitalized, as an adverb in this case, and "with" would not, as it's a preposition--typically, any word in a title is capitalized except for articles and prepositions.)
ReplyDeleteAnd I love that your imaginary friend was named Window. Mine was named Timothy Josey. The loss of an imaginary friend certainly qualifies as a significant first step toward abandoning or forsaking the felicities of youth and coming to terms with the "real world"--and isn't there some real melancholy surrounding this, a loss of magic and imagination? I know I used to "play football," alone in the yard, with my imaginary friend, and I would recall these episodes quite vividly. What was really happening, I wonder? I picture a little toddler just running around in a yard, talking to himself, throwing and kicking a Nerf ball around. But in my memory--not just in my experience at the time--I'm playing with someone else, and the games would be intense and very real. There's something amazing about that kind of imagination, and it's sad to acknowledge that one simply cannot live in such a hallucinatory state and be taken seriously as a viable adult.
Ahem. "The Little Mermaid" is a Disney Princess movie! Ariel is a princess even if she doesn't have legs... anyway, I agree with point that everyone is maturing throughout their lives, but is their a "spurt" of sort where people grow up a lot at once? Or is a personal tragedy happens, does that make people grow up faster?
ReplyDeleteIt kind of seems like coming of age is an ongoing thing. Kind of life, you always have more and more to learn, so there are new and different ways to come of age in different portions of your life. The idea of coming of age has been consuming me for a while too, especially with college apps.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Maddie. I think coming of age is a gradual process, and although there might be specific time periods or events where the transition is clearly evident, everything else in the person's life is leading up to that. We see this in Portrait; the book is basically a bunch of different things from Stephen's life that feed into one another, and culminate in him becoming a different person as he gets older.
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