Already two weeks behind...uh oh. Here's a shorter post than the last. I got a little tripped up on what I wanted to write about as there are just so many things to say about moving into DePaul in 19 days. (Can I get a yikes and woohoo at the same time?!) Here goes nothing:
As I lay in bed during another late night I have come to a semi-important realization: I think I was in love with the past. And right now, as I am getting ready to leave for college, I am in this weird limbo between wanting to remember as much as possible and trying to push away anything that could induce nostalgia.
No one my age right now, in this very moment, or really in the next few years, can tell you definitively if high school was great or terrible. Some people may have extremely concrete answers and that’s fine. I can tell you that I would pay an exorbitant amount of money to go back to my junior year but no one could pay me enough money to go through the wonderful consequences of sleep loss that occurred over four years. There’s this sick sort of camaraderie that forms when everyone is running on less than five hours of sleep and binge eating fruit snacks in a fourth period class to stay awake. That’s what I believe we are nostalgic for: being in a classroom with other people that understand what we’re feeling and loving the process and hopefully the material we are leaning.
Leaving for college, we are nostalgic because we are worried or afraid that we might never get that feeling back. Life shouldn’t plateau out after high school. That’s terrifying and depressing. When I’m at school, I know I’ll miss all the stuff related to high school. But can you imagine what you are missing out on by sitting in your dorm scrolling through old Facebook photos wishing you were somewhere else? If I’m going to essentially become locked into the prison that is student debt you better believe I am going to both study harder than before and also kick the crap out of whatever free time I can get my hands on. Now is my time to do everything I’ve been wanting to and everything that has been waiting for me. And I really hope a year from now, I can read this post and say, “Job well done.”
