Coming of Age

“I am so embarrassed. I am not a real person yet.”

– Frances, “Frances Ha”

A first kiss, awkward, and inelegant. Falling in love for the first time, convinced the whole world can hear the pounding of your heart. A coming of age experience often occurs when we least expect it. It is an experience which is uniquely ours but also universal. Coming of age is a defining moment when a person’s innocence is replaced with something deeper and more meaningful. It is the moment when you realize that answers must come from within and that you are responsible for your own happiness.

Coming of age movies deal with identity and the way in which identity arises. They recall the events that have shaped us and that have made us who we are. In a sense, we are always coming of age, always losing innocence, always gaining understanding, and always discovering new truths about ourselves. Coming of age is the act of experiencing a shift in one’s perspective, a greater realization of one’s place in the world, and a further understanding of how our personal actions shape our future lives.

Coming of age movies are magical because they examine an interior world for which no language exists. They explore the space between what belongs to the individual alone and what can be shared with others. They explore the shifts in our thoughts and in our feelings as they flow this way and that way in order to reveal that part of ourselves that defines who we really are.

I recommend an extraordinary documentary film that delivers a deeply moving introduction to the coming of age experience. Grace VanderWaal bought her first ukulele with money she received for her eleventh birthday. She taught herself to play her new ukulele by watching a YouTube video. On a whim, her mom signed Grace up for America’s Got Talent when she was twelve years old. Grace performed four songs that she wrote on America’s Got Talent. Watch the YouTube video “Grace VanderWaal All Performances In America’s Got Talent” to find out what happened!

The songs Grace performed on America’s Got Talent each address a different aspect of the coming of age experience. “I Don’t Know My Name” is about forming a personal identity. “Beautiful Thing” is about exploring that identity with a close friend. “Light The Sky” celebrates the amazing power of just being yourself and living life to the fullest. Finally, “Clay” addresses the challenge of maintaining one’s identity when other people start chipping away at who you are. The coming of age experience is about the events that shape us. What matters most, however, are our emotional reactions to those events. Music speaks to our emotions in a way words alone are not capable of.

Grace’s brother, Jacob VanderWaal, has said that Grace is utterly fearless. We usually think of courage as being a masculine characteristic. A brave man is one who is unflinching as he uses physical force to defeat something external to himself. This is the type of courage we find in Homer’s “Iliad” and “Odyssey.” I think the story of Joan of Arc surprises and inspires us because she embraces the traditional, male expression of courage.

Perhaps true courage, on the other hand, is an internal struggle to find and express one’s identity and to determine how one should relate to others and to the world. In Montaigne’s essay, “On Experience,” he writes, “Greatness of soul is not so much pressing upward and forward as knowing how to circumscribe and set oneself in order.” I believe Grace expresses her fearlessness through her music as she confronts questions of identity and how best to relate to the larger world.

Music is able to transport us to a higher level, to offer us a new perspective, and to change us in unexpected ways. In an interview, the renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma likens music to the Socratic method. Music asks us, “How would you find an answer?” We need music because it helps us get to very specific states of mind. We respond to music on both the conscious and subconscious levels. Certain smells, for example, can recall the memory of grandmother’s apple pie. Music does something similar. It reminds us of a first kiss, of a rainy night, of walking alone in a forest.

Like other great singer-songwriters, Grace VanderWaal occupies a central place between the world and her listeners. She observes the world, filters her observations through her unique way of looking at things, and then conveys her thoughts and feelings to her listeners in the form of sublime music. The music critic Grant Tribe describes Grace as having been born into this world as the “true spirit of music.”

When placed side by side, some of the adjectives often used to describe Grace’s music seem contradictory, serious and lighthearted, for example, or innocent and an old soul, to take another example. Grace’s complete, gorgeous humanity contains multitudes so it makes sense that those multitudes would contain contradictions.

Grace’s unique talent includes a rich variety of vocal inflections, the mystery she conveys in her lyrics, her vivid and often surprising images, her lack of cliche, her succinctness, her frankness, and even her imperfections. Grace is the opposite of everything that is fake, contrived, unkind, or unintelligent. We are fortunate to be able to enjoy her music and her unique perspective on life.

Here are four extraordinary movies about the transition from childhood to adulthood. The first two movies, “Aparajito” and “Apur Sansar” complete Satyagit Ray’s sublime Apu trilogy. The coming of age experience in these movies is quite different from our typical modern experience. Family members die and Apu is forced to stand on his own and adjust to changed circumstances.

“Frances Ha” follows an entirely different trajectory. These days a person can delay coming of age practically indefinitely. This doesn’t make the passage to adulthood any easier, though. Finally, I have included the movie “My Golden Days,” because, like the Apu trilogy, it follows the protagonist from childhood all the way into adulthood. We are able to observe the kind of man he becomes.