I thought I had it all figured out. Thought is the operative word here. Don’t think because thinking is doubting, not knowing.

I turned twenty over the break. “So, big deal,” I told myself. There isn’t much difference between twenty and nineteen. Mathematically, this observation couldn’t be more accurate. Realistically, it couldn’t be more wrong. In essence, the difference between nineteen and twenty is the difference between thirty-nine and forty. Instead of a mid-life crisis; however, this is a preemptive quarter-life crisis. I know it sounds foolish, naive, immature, and…well, like I’m a nineteen-year-old who has abhorred turning twenty.

As I turned twenty, I came to a startling realization: despite the hyperbolic statements of elderly relatives, I do not keep growing. I am a full-grown man. I suppose that’s the word I am tackling with here, manhood. What delineates childhood from adulthood, or better yet, adolescence from adulthood? Can it be only one year? Is the difference between nineteen and twenty the difference between being a boy and being a man? Physically it is not, but psychologically it may be.

The transition from nineteen to twenty, or more accurately to adulthood, is much like a mountain climb. One’s mind can see the summit, but not the false precipices that lay before it. One continues to trudge through the crevice-laden terrain without realizing he’s gone off the path. One reaches into his backpack for a drink from the canteen, but neglects to horde some water for the return trip. In spite of the physical handicaps, one begins to doubt and to question one’s own courage. It is not the physical limitations that hinder him, but the mental obstacles. One overcomes the odds, negotiates the terrain, and reaches the summit. He is overwrought with dissatisfaction, a vacant pang of the stomach due not to doubt but to fear. A milestone has been achieved, but traversing downward is tumultuous at best. He has turned the corner, but wishes not to see what waits around it.

Perhaps like my aging relatives I am being a bit hyperbolic myself, but being an adult carries with it freedom, and freedom entails responsibility. It is this responsibility that ignites an amalgam of emotions and a spectrum of thought. These thoughts and emotions are often contradictory. I yearn for the blithe world of a teenager, yet I pine for the complex cosmos of the adult. I want to use teen angst as a scapegoat, but I know that I fully bear the ramifications of my adult actions.

I suppose that the only way to synopsize the transition would be to call it, in every Bostonian sense of the word, weird. It’s weird being a “twenty-something.” It’s weird knowing that I can remember when hall-of-famers Ozzie Smith and Kirby Puckett played. It’s weird that I’ve lived through two decades. It’s weird when people ask me my age. Maybe it’s not wicked weird, but it’s weird nonetheless.

Intrinsic in any crisis is conflict, but when the conflict is internal between me and myself, it is that much harder to convince myself that I am right. I don’t mean to sound borderline schizophrenic here, but self-conflict is perhaps the worst type of conflict. In order to become a man, must I displace all childhood memories and tendencies? In order to pass the test of time, must I look ahead in time to the future or back in time to the past? It’s a curious quandary of which Christopher Lloyd and Michael J. Fox would be proud.

What most scared me in this transition, what I was most fearful of, was the fact that I have lived long enough to witness tragedy. Not only have I witnessed tragedy, but I am also able to somewhat comprehend the magnanimity of it. Sept. 11 certainly did not fill anyone’s life with ease, but in that Bostonian weird way, it may have put life in general in a much more profound perspective.

Admittedly, compared to what has happened to this nation in the past five months, my crisis is extremely trite. I can only resolve it as I have resolved all other crisis in my life, by having faith in myself. Although I have metamorphosed physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, etc. in my teenage years, belief in myself has been unaltered. It is truly one of life’s dichotomies that in the face of doubt and cynicism our faith in ourselves is somehow bolstered. Yes, I am I doubter. Yes, also, I am a believer.

Perhaps the difference between nineteen and twenty is just the difference between belief and doubt. We doubt ourselves and dupe ourselves into believing that some life-altering process is about to commence, while we fail to believe in our own God-given abilities and ourselves. We perceive that we cannot reach the summit, but reality tells us that we can and will ourselves to reach it.

My crisis has been tentatively averted. I think it was just a passing moment, a brief sweet respite. I’ve faced the fact that I am no longer a teen pop sensation. I’m comfortable with being twenty, though; I am a year older, a year wiser, and a year closer to twenty-one. I think I am over my quarter life crisis, but “just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.”