Toby Harris: On dependent independence

Our late teens and early twenties present the threshold and doorway to “adulthood proper”. If life were a novel, being 20 would be Chapter 5., 0-5 first, 5-11 second, 11-15 third, 15-19 fourth and 20 opens up to Chapter 5.

0-5, Chapter One: we are glued to our mothers’ breasts and carried on our fathers’ backs. We are merely parental accessories and dependent squibs for basic sustenance. Chapter Two, we are attached to the hands of our creators when walking in public places and they still exert an unerring command over our food orders at restaurants.

Chapter Three gets interesting – intrigue creeps in. Desire to test our former hand-holding, food controlling, mysteriously superior elders sidles in. We might try a bit of contraband simply because we realise that we can.

Chapter Four – Mum still coughs up the “going-out money” and it is widely accepted that parents are the primary source of funding for social activities. A threat of being grounded may waft in the air but our parents’ seeming powerlessness becomes more apparent.

Chapter Five, you’re 20. The époque of the teens gives way to that of the twenties. Parental guidance marginalizes, offering the opportunity to grab our life by the scruff of the neck and command it as our own. Sounds good doesn’t it.

Being 20, the rebellious 14-18 stage is a fond, relatively distant and embarrassing memory as the époque of the teens gives way to that of the 20s. It sounds odd to say that you are twenty, that’s two whole decades. It takes an inordinate length of time to get used to saying your own age. No longer are we given the condescending title of “young man” or “young lady” that we were assigned in Chapter Three. Young though we are, our titles morph into being the seldom “man” and “woman”- as adults in our own right.

By the age of twenty, rent needs to be paid, food shopping needs to be done and evidence that rooms don’t clean themselves are all duly noted. Employment is necessary as parents withdraw from the position as the staple source of income and the parental bank disintegrates before our very own eyes.

In Chapter Five, events, interactions, commitments and expectations exist that formally did not. Face to face interaction becomes more common than Blackberry Messenger and Facebook Chat. Chapter 5 demands that you are no longer introduced as, “this is my son/daughter” you are your own person. You have a name. You sculpt and command your own introduction.

Finally, Chapter Five is a pivotal turning point in the novel. The change may be subtle, it may be symbolic but it undoubtedly has profound effects on subsequent chapters. It’s exciting because for the first time we are free to make it our own but there’s pressure to make Chapter 5 an exciting read. We are the authors of our very own novels but the plot for the rest of our book is heavily dependent on the sequence of events in this chapter.