The Split Screen of Growing Up

Some of my friends are still living on instant coffee and 3 a.m. pasta, others are buying dishwashers and announcing pregnancies. Both timelines exist in the same group chat.

It’s strange to watch a friend group fracture into parallel timelines. Half of my friends still live in dorms, bedroom walls cluttered with postcards, pinned polaroids, ticket stubs from concerts we barely remember. Their lives run on caffeine, and they huddle with half-empty bottles at formals, eating plain pasta out of the pot at three in the morning during exam season, arguing over who gets the glitter eyeliner before going out, or who’s stolen whose hoodie again. There are still tears over boys who will never matter and breakdowns over deadlines that suddenly do. But there’s also resilience in it; the way pain can be laughed off and the way a late-night walk can feel like a cure.

The other half are already inhabiting a different version of adulthood. They move into flats with dishwashers and parquet floors, send around photos of engagement rings, or post pregnancy announcements with the same excitement we once reserved for timetable reveals, hoping they would match up somewhere. Their lives are no less chaotic, only reframed: instead of essays and heartbreak, it’s mortgages and ultrasounds, Ikea trips and guest lists. They panic over choosing the right rug, debate mug colours like it’s life or death, and stress over which saucepan set will last the longest. And honestly—we love it. There’s something endearing about it, the way we all lean in when someone asks if cream or sage mugs will feel too clinical in the morning light, as if the fate of the household depends on it. We send opinions, screenshots, links, all with the same urgency we have for analysing whether boys’ liking on our Instagram story carries a deeper meaning. The group chat makes no distinction: honeymoon photos next to 3 am crashout memes and Amazon links for blenders alongside screenshots of lecture slides. It’s not one better, one worse; it’s just a split screen, impossible to reconcile, yet somehow coexisting.

And then there’s also me, still in the 3 a.m. plain pasta group. Still buried in books, still ruled by deadlines instead of calendars, with years of essays stretched ahead of me. Last night I sat on the floor with scissors, wire, and a stack of old music sheets my boyfriend had given me, half of them pieces he hated so much he wanted them burned. I started cutting them up and glueing together a little carousel while lectures played in the background. It was less about the craft itself than about keeping myself awake, something to do with my hands as I pushed through seventeen hours of revision without drifting off.

It began as a shaky wire frame that refused to stay upright, but once it stood on its own I kept decorating: bows tied too tightly, strips of gold lace pressed into place, edges trimmed with delicate frills, tiny white pompoms glued on wherever there was space. Hot glue webbed across my fingers, lace clung to my sleeves, and glitter dusted the whole floor. It was messy, excessive, faintly ridiculous, but it worked: the carousel kept me moving, one lecture sliding into the next while the thing slowly came alive on the floor beside me.

It felt less like adulthood and more like the crafts we used to do at fourteen, where we stayed up until sunrise hot-glueing rhinestones to notebooks and thinking we were reinventing the world. And underneath it all, we’re still girls, still saving screenshots of dumb texts, still squealing over crushes, still half-convinced a perfect outfit can change the outcome of a night. Some of my friends are becoming mothers, while I’m still texting mine to ask if wool can survive the dryer. The dissonance is absurd, old enough to raise someone else, young enough to need supervision for groceries. Their adulthood feels as precarious as my adolescence did: nervous, makeshift, full of choices that feel heavier than they probably are. And there’s something sweet in that, too, the way seriousness and silliness blur together. Picking a mug colour, planning a nursery, deciding whether to text him back: all different costumes for the same nervous theatre of growing up.

This isn’t jealousy, and it isn’t nostalgia. It’s the eerie sensation of two lives unfolding at once: one lit by the library’s fluorescent glow at four in the morning, the other by the warm lamp in a new apartment. Both timelines feel real, both beautiful in their own way, yet they never quite touch.

Sometimes I wonder if my academic ambitions are just a way of postponing the inevitable, or if this slower rhythm is simply my version of moving forward. I love seeing both timelines unfold, but the thought alone makes me feel more fourteen than ready, too young for a child, too old to pretend time hasn’t started its work.

Replying to good-morning texts at seven with “hiii I’m still awake haha” sometimes makes me wince. Not because anyone judges me—there is no rivalry in it, no hierarchy—but because it highlights the gap. And yet, in spite of everything, we still share the same pulse: the FaceTime calls that stretch past midnight, the analysis of someone’s new crush, the coffee catch-ups where gossip collapses time, and we’re in the same spot again.

The split screen remains, flickering and uneven. It doesn’t divide us so much as remind us how many lives can be lived in the same span of years. Maybe there is no right order, only different paces, different textures, each uncanny in its own way. And maybe growing up is less about which screen you’re on than about learning how to hold both at once without looking away, knowing they may never quite sync—and loving them anyway.