What is 22?
Working with kids, I think I get asked my age more than most. It’s easy to forget how significant the chasm between five and six is. How much each year matters to them - the experience they’ve gained, the skills they’ve learnt. Working with kids, I also get very honest responses to the fact I am 22: ‘OMG I thought you were seventeen!’ ‘Are you sure you’re not thirty?’ ‘Are you married?’. Sometimes they just immediately start singing Taylor Swift. It’s hard not to wonder, beyond the chasm between five and six, whether age actually matters. What am I meant to have done by now? Is 22 anything more than a pop song?
The immediate point of research is obviously instagram. What are other people my age doing? One girl I went to school with is rowing for Oxford in the boat race. Another is performing in a backing band at Glastonbury. Two have had babies. So so so so many are travelling around East Asia. One is a character performer at Disneyland. A lot are still students, following a gap year, or two or three. Of my university cohort, several have already won creative writing awards. Several have also moved back in with mum and dad. I’m jealous of half of them, without ever having had the inclination to row/spend 8 hours a day dressed as Princess Elsa, but it still hasn’t helped. What am I meant to be doing?
As ever, the other main paradigm is family. My parents got engaged at twenty one. TWENTY ONE. This seemed logical and adult when I was small but having just been twenty one I’m fairly sure I’m still only half formed. I don’t want to be making life changing decisions right now. I don’t even know who I am yet. I don’t know if they knew who they were either. I don’t know if they know who they are now. Last year my parents both turned fifty. By that age my grandmother already had her first grandchild. My mum is now five years younger than Betty White’s character at the start of Golden Girls, but she loves Stormzy and new trainers and BeReal. The old paradigms of her age definitely don’t belong to her, so why would her paradigm belong to me?
Recently, I’ve been doing a lot of reading (watching some tiktoks) about polychronic societies. Growing up in Europe, I have been used to monochronic time management - sticking to a schedule is everything, time management is linear and tasks must be ticked off before moving on to the next thing. The creep of global capitalism compounds this, as every minute, hour, day, week, year, is something I am meant to be using to achieve, or profit off of. Polychronic cultures (found largely across Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East) instead understand time as a flexible thing, prioritising relationships, and completing things to the full regardless of the time it takes, rather than in the ‘allotted’ time. Learning about this feels as though it has changed something in me.
I spent my school and university career checking boxes, handing things in on time, making sure I hit every milestone I ‘should’ have by that point, regardless of whether they were things I actually wanted. Now, there are no set milestones, or at least none which align with who I think I am right now. I am free, and that is kind of terrifying. Viewing my twenties from a polychronic mindset means it is not a time limit filled with tick boxes each year, but rather an expanse of time that I can fill as I see fit. I want my focus to be on experiencing it all, not ‘achieving’. So yes I am twenty two. And yes that is just a Taylor Swift song.
Niamh Duncan is an author, theatre maker and knitter living in Norwich, England. Having graduated from the University of East Anglia with a first-class degree in creative writing, she is now engaged in answering life’s big questions, namely how do you pay your rent with a degree in creative writing. In her spare time Niamh loves drinking tea and cocktails (usually not simultaneously) and going for long rambling walks.