"Youth is incredible because you really do feel invincible." - Paul Stanley
I've heard this said in different forms so many times. My family has told me this, my professors and teachers have told me this, and at times even I had said this. I think the reason this has been stereotyped to youth is because we are still new to the world (I'm saying this even as a 20-year old. I have not been here long at all); We have not been around long enough to see the vulnerableness of neither the world nor ourselves, so why would we think anything less? In this regard, I want to postulate that "youth" is not a linear concept; it is a spectrum in which we are put through harrowing events that cause our youth to slowly be lost.
We all are slowly introduced to human vulnerability as we grow older. The first loss I can remember was when my great uncle died. I was 13 years old. I'm not saying others died before then, because there were. I only remember his death because he died of Leukemia. I remember when my mother came home that day and told us that he had died, I said I wanted to see him. She told me, "No. He wouldn't want you to see him the way he is now". What she meant by that was she didn't think I would want to see my great uncle, a man who my brother and I respected and loved so much, strapped in a hospital bed with so many tubes going into his body he looked more robot than human. Part of me wants to believe it was him who didn't want me to see him that way, but I can't help but imagine it was really my mother telling me I wasn't ready to come face to face with the reality of my own vulnerability.
Not even six months later, I was diagnosed with Type One Diabetes, inevitably being faced with my vulnerability once again. This time, it wasn't looking at it from a distance, but it was right there. My mother and I rushed myself over to the hospital that night, and I stayed there for three days as I was given a crash course on a disease I would live with for the rest of my life. Every time my blood sugar goes low, my mind races to a life or death situation (thank you anxiety). I've had such a fear of this, that I would then run my blood sugar higher than it should be, which inevitably shortens my lifespan due to complications down the line. I am constantly trying to keep my vulnerability in check now because of this disease. Flash forward three years. It's now the summer after my first year at college, and I was dating my now ex-boyfriend. When we broke up, I didn't handle it well and began contemplating suicide. Obviously that didn't end up happening, but I thought of using my Diabetes as my escape. I knew what my vulnerability was, and was preparing to exploit it.
I'm writing my article on this because one of my friends from middle school died last week. We hadn't talked since middle school, and as a matter of fact I had only thought about him a few days before because I saw that he updated his Facebook profile picture. Three days had passed, and then I found out he was stopped at a stop-light, and a dump truck came up behind him at 70mph.
His death really began making me think once again about mortality, and how we as humans come to terms with how vulnerable we actually are. The phrase about how youth feel that they are invincible is undoubtedly true; however, we learn through loss that we truly are not. Loss is what causes us to mature, and understand that there are things about our lives that can change in the blink of an eye, and we have to be grateful for what we still do have.
