The Burden of Aging

The transition from childhood to adulthood was too sudden, too abrupt. It caught me off guard.

My mother started telling me to start taking responsibilities for myself when I clocked 16.  It felt strange. I was used to people getting my things sorted out for me. At school, while I was still in secondary school, my mother would tell my brother to drop by at my school to pay my school fees. At the beginning of each term, my mother herself would travel down to the market to buy me new bags and socks and books and stationery. When she started telling me to go buy things by myself, to go fetch things by myself, to start telling myself anything that happens to me was my fault, I started feeling strange. It was as though my mother was shifting my position from being the lastborn to the first.

The transition from childhood to adulthood was too sudden, too abrupt. It caught me off guard.

But we didn’t know what that meant. We did not know aging comes with its burdens and that it would have been better for us to remain how we were, as innocent young lads.

I first noticed some strands of hair on my armpits some days to my 17th birthday. At school, I was not shy of exposing my armpits to my classmates to show them the sprouts. It was a competition: it started when Abolusodun, a classmate, told us he had strands of hair growing around his groin. Since then, every morning in the bathroom, almost every one of us examined our shafts to check if we were growing up too. We stopped measuring aging by our ages, we stopped arguing who the older person was. Body development became our age measuring tool. Until mine came out, I was amongst the youngest in the class.

But we didn’t know what that meant. We did not know aging comes with its burdens and that it would have been better for us to remain how we were, as innocent young lads.

The most treacherous age, for me, was 21. Clocking 20 seemed like a milestone, especially if you had known what ‘a decade’ meant before clocking 20 and you assume you’re making two. I told my mother on my 20th birthday that, today, I become a man, as I thought that is the age manhood begins. My mother sent those words back in my throat and told me I had become a man since the day I showed her what came out of me:

On one of the days I was watching 16 from afar, that night, my mother sent me to buy bread at Oluyori. Our area at night is a dark hole that headlights from motorcycles seem like penetrations. But we weren’t scared to walk it at night because it was safe, unlike now. As I was returning, I saw a light flashing from an uncompleted building. I didn’t know what drove me, I approached the building and met a man jerking a woman against the wall: the harder the man jerked, the fiercer the woman moaned. I stood there, watching them for some minutes before running home. As I was running, I had grown hard and it was dangling left-right in my trousers. When I got home, I showed my mother the melty water coming out of me and she spoke into my ears not to tell anyone and henceforth should stay away from my female friends.

The transition from childhood to adulthood was too sudden, too abrupt. It caught me off guard.

I was fascinated by those words she said to me because I knew what they meant – I had started taking biology as a subject in school. Before and at 20, all these were stupid, crave-y fascinations. At 21, the burden of aging built on me and I started blaming 20 for coming. At 21, you grow loads of questions before yourself. How have I spent my last two decades? What would it be like to step into another decade? What exactly have I achieved so far? My 21st birthday met me on a transit, returning from Ilorin to Iwo during the pandemic. On Facebook, I wrote some thoughts about what it meant to cross the border of ‘teen’, about imaginary houses of achievements I built for myself. It was mental threatening; tracing and trudging down the memory lane of achievements. I was unable to pin out a tangible box of achievement I mold for myself. Being unable to draw a box for myself made me decide to start working harder, to start preparing so much before the half of the new decade. I told myself, before 22, I should have been published in this so journal. By 23, I should be enrolled into a writing program. Before 23 runs out, I should be planning to publish my debut novel. Lmao.

I have stopped tying my value of existence to my age. I threw myself into the pool of depression when I thought I should be what my age mates were becoming. I have a partner who is way younger than I am, but have achieved what I didn’t achieve when I was their age. Tying success or value or achievement to age makes you think you haven’t achieved anything. I have stepped out of the former me and I am building a future for myself in every possible way I can. I am building it as the events unfold by themselves and not to achieve them before I clock a particular age.

I have started telling the younger folks around me to be careful of age 21. It seems like a beautiful age to look up to, but it is the age that denies you everything you intend to become. You lose yourself into the hands of becoming as you age. You’d believe to have become this or that at 21. I think you should continue living as life unfolds itself and pull, to the very best of your ability, every stone you can. If a stone feels larger than you are, try to pull, and if you can't, let it be and find another. You don’t want to live your life as a clone of Sisyphus.