Senior Moments: The moment I knew

The end of the school year is fast approaching, and we can feel it. Underclassmen are stressing over how they’re going to fit all their classes into next year’s schedule, and seniors are constantly muttering the mantra of, “Let’s just get through this. We’re almost done.” There are countdowns and college to-do lists and graduation preparations. Kids are wearing T-shirts with big block letters and changing their Instagram bios to display their future schools in an effort to show anyone who may look that they have their lives together. I’m getting calls from financial aid offices and more mail than I’ve ever received in my entire life. It’s all very adult.

I can actually pinpoint the exact moment I first felt like a “grown-up.” When Tina Fey wrote in her autobiography "Bossypants" the moment for her was when she bought a white pantsuit to wear to a high school award ceremony, I laughed, but then realized mine wasn’t too dierent.

When I was in third or fourth grade, I was in a ballet class with a college student who had decided she was going to live out her childhood dreams by spending four hours a week in a dance studio with a bunch of nine-year-olds. She was blonde and smart and would regale us with tales of being a grown-up and not having to make your bed. We all adored her.

One day, she had to leave class early for an interview. She went into the dressing room in a leotard and tights and came out in a black skirt and a pair of high heels that looked as if someone had taken watercolors and painted a flower bed on a white canvas, then turned it into a pair of shoes. I remember looking at her and thinking she could have stepped out of a movie about a young woman out and about town in some big city. I watched her walk out in those impossibly high heels that in my mind were the epitome of being a grown up and decided when I was an adult, I was going to wear that same thing every day.

Fast forward nine or so years to last spring: I’m shopping with my mom and sister for shoes to wear to the impending prom. We’d been to dozens of stores, and I’d tried on hundreds of shoes, but nothing was right. Then, on the third floor of Macy’s, I found them. An almost exact replica of the shoes I was so taken with as a nine-year-old. I put them on, and for the first time, saw myself in the way I saw that college girl years ago. It was the strangest form of déjà vu — to actually feel like a person that at one time existed only in my head.

Growing up is a gradual, never-ending process, even if it can feel like it rolls over you all at once in one big, instantaneous change. It’s like having a birthday — you’re not really significantly older than you were the day before, but it’s an event that forces you to recognize the fact that you are, indeed, growing up. These days, the reminders I’m growing up are everywhere, and I’m doing my best not to blink and miss them.

Mia Timlin is a senior at Notre Dame Regional High School. She's lived in Cape Girardeau for five years and loves reading, dancing, watching movies and listening to music by the Beatles.