Consider this piece my short update on how I’ve been trying to romanticize my spring semester at UC Berkeley — or at least trying to.
Doing the impossible is impossible, right? When I came across this trend, I couldn’t help but appreciate its creativity and layers. “No borax, no glue” nods to our memories and experiences as children who scoured YouTube for tutorials about how to make slime without its two key ingredients.
The truth is, we couldn’t do it — because it’s simply impossible — but we tried anyway.
The interesting aspect of this trend is that it points to our feelings of control — or lack thereof. People on the internet definitely earn brownie points for creatively applying this concept to their own lives. Some have shared scenarios such as “How to stay a teenager forever, no borax, no glue” and “How to keep my dog alive, no borax, no glue.” Scrolling through the different scenarios people shared on TikTok has since encouraged me to reflect on the things I want or lack control over in my life — or at least the things I want to do without “borax” or “glue.”
Admittedly, I’ve felt like I’ve spread myself too thin in my last semester at Berkeley, which has caused overwhelming stress. Sometimes, I wish I’d become numb to the pressures, but it hasn’t happened — yet. The countdown toward finishing my last semester of undergrad has made the feeling of doing more feel pressing. It has also brought up feelings of uncertainty and regret for the loss of opportunities I could have taken. This fear has forced me to spread myself thin to avoid feelings of regret that could result from not pursuing the moments I desperately wanted to experience in my 20s.
My persistence to explore new clubs and attempts to befriend classmates have become an exhausting yet promising process that I continue to idealize and engage in despite the challenges and dismissals I’ve been dealt with. In the grand scheme of searching for answers on maintaining the excitement of being in my 20s forever, I fear the shortness of time I have left in this stage of my life and want to hold onto the privileges of everything I can do as an undergrad student.
In theory — if life truly gave me lemons right now, I would make the lemonade that would allow me to be content with the experiences I’ve had in college. I would also especially love to make slime that sustained the everlasting feelings of freedom and excitement associated with being in your twenties.
For now, I’m hoping to take everything as it is and, at least, control what I can at the moment. The urge to overthink certainly cannot escape the conditions of “no borax, no glue,” but here’s to hoping — myself included — we all continue in our attempts to “make slime without borax or glue.”