I am grateful for the elements of my 20 years and look forward to 21

I recently read a collection of short essays by Oliver Sacks titled “Gratitude.” These essays, particularly “My Periodic Table,” got me thinking about my own experiences, and this got me writing about my life.

This piece doesn’t stack up against the marvelous work of Sacks, but it’s where I’ll start.

A lover of the sciences, Sacks mentions his adoration of the elements, matching their atomic numbers with his recent birthdays (e.g., mercury for 80, thallium for 81). In the essay “Mercury,” Sacks is 79 (“…I am gold,” he remarks). In “My Periodic Table,” he just turned 82 and has a little lead casket containing radioactive element No. 90. I’ve never quite understood chemistry; I often joke with my friends that science is something I “admire from afar.” It’s something I deeply respect and enjoy learning about, but not something I do actively.

Still, after I read Sacks’ piece, I wanted to know what element corresponded to my age now — 20, soon to be 21 — and what that means for me. Element No. 20 on the periodic table is calcium. I had to Google all of this, including the following information from the Royal Society of Chemistry website: “Calcium is essential to all living things, particularly for the growth of healthy teeth and bones.”

I had ideas for some metaphors behind this, but I worried I’d come off trite or insincere. I didn’t want to superficially connect my 20 years to calcium. I thought, though, that with some mindfulness and introspection, I could try.

Twenty, like most years, has been quite mixed. I learned about myself, my friends and my family. I felt stress, fury, ecstasy, hurt, inspiration, sorrow, gratitude, love and indifference. Yet even in this year's similarity to other years, it has felt different in that everything has felt necessary. All of the events that occurred — the feelings that burned, the tears that fell and the laughs that burst — felt essential. In retrospect, they have been necessary for my “healthy growth.”

This brings me to another amazing read by another inspiring individual: “When Breath Becomes Air” by Paul Kalanithi. In it he says, “You can’t ever reach perfection, but you can believe in an asymptote toward which you are ceaselessly striving.” This is what I want to do, and what I think I am doing now: striving toward an infinite end, and determining what that end is. That is what Kalanithi did, and even in death, he is a force of light.

With the messages of Sacks and Kalanithi in mind, I’ve concluded that maybe what I’ve experienced at 20 are essential to me, the way calcium is essential to life. The “feelings-at-20” help define the asymptote. Alternatively, they might muddle up the asymptote even more, and it’ll take years or decades to uncover it. That’s OK. It’s all part of the process.

I couldn’t resist a quick peek at the future. I looked up element No. 21. It’s scandium, and the Royal Society of Chemistry says it’s “mainly used for research purposes.” That actually seems to line up, doesn’t it? Another year of research, of trying to figure it out or messing it up even more. I can’t wait.

Mia Gettenberg is a UF criminology and law and philosophy junior. Her column appears on Mondays.