As a senior in high school, I'm doing the one thing every child dreams of, and everyone else dreads: adulting. Yes, I realize that's not an actual word, but many people have used it before to describe exactly what I'm talking about: doing responsible adult-like things and being productive. While children may see being an adult as this awesome unattainable thing, actual adults know the true struggles.
Many people have gone through what I'm going through now, and I'm just now realizing how stressful it really is, and I'm hating myself more and more for taking on too many things and procrastinating like crazy.
To prepare for college, you have to write all these essays and turn in your life story plus all the honors that you can conjure up to make yourself seem like a more accomplished person than you actually are. Once you've accumulated a web of stretched truths, you then write essay after essay about the same things, but in different words because the topics are slightly different, which makes a world of difference. By the time you finish one essay, you realize you need to write three more after that, and then when you finish those, there somehow ends up being ten more.
If you somehow manage to finish all the essays that keep racking up exponentially, you have homework that needs to be finished. Yes, among all the college prep that you've been doing, there's still high school responsibilities. By the time you finish the poetry analyses, it'll be late into the night because half the time that you spent writing and the other half the time you spent eating. If you push through though, you might have enough time to study for that math test that you have first thing in the morning. But that's taking into consideration that you're skipping out on squad night to be responsible. If you don't skip, maybe you'll get home at around 11, which leaves just enough time to finish everything, take a quick shower and sleep for exactly two hours and 16 minutes.
Of course, in the morning you'll feel absolutely exhausted, but it was all worth it, right? You make it through the week like this, only to realize in that time, you forgot to account for extracurricular activities. Maybe football, basketball, debate, band, or cheer practice took up a solid chunk of your week. That leaves less time to fill out college applications and write essays.
Oh no! You forgot that you also need to balance your social life in there too. Maybe attend a birthday party every once in a while or hang out with friends or host a group study session, during which you get absolutely nothing accomplished. Those all count as social things right? Even though you can't quite Instagram those, they still validate that you're not a complete loser. Speaking of Instagram, you remember that you need to plan a few cool outdoor trips in advance with friends and family, so you can add them to your instagram page just to seem artsy and creative.
While we're still on the topic of social media, don't forget that you joined that one writing club thing. What was it called? The newspaper activity Odyssey! Yes! I joined Odyssey as a creative outlet. But wait, there's something else I seem to be forgetting. Oh crap! My article is due today, and I haven't written anything yet! It's almost 9 and I need to turn it in soon... Better get writing!
Yeah, I really suck at this adulting thing.
