Last week I was in panic mode. I was cramming for a final in a Spanish-language, politics class that I was totally unprepared for, and trying to salvage my summer after I got rejected from an internship I was confident I would get. The company I would have interned for told me they “decided to go with another candidate" just two weeks before I would have started working for them. Subsequently, my mind was chock-full of images of an older, unemployed me in Dorito-stained sweatpants, cry-watching the Game Show Network on my parents' TV. I do not even like the Game Show Network. Why would I be watching that?
As I was trying to pull myself together, I managed to hear a Spotify song over the DEFCON 5 sirens in my head. “Wish we could turn time, to the good ol' days / When our momma sang us to sleep but now we're stressed out". It was "Stressed Out" by 21 Pilots. I had never listened to the song's lyrics before. I paused everything else to think them over.
If I could turn back time …
Everything was so much simpler when I was younger. Back then, my hardest decisions was choosing which Disney video cassettes to watch. My toughest challenge was coloring inside of the lines. And my biggest responsibility was doing my spelling homework. Everything else was figured out for me. My parents prepared my clothes, my food, and my schedule. Even my friendships were set up for me via play dates and recess. I became friends with whoever I played hide n' seek with, and those friendships, once formed, did not require a lot of maintenance. My friend may have pushed me off the swing once, or I may have yelled at him because he took the action figure that I wanted, but those incidents never affected our relationship. By the next day, we would be running around the playground like nothing had happened. Oh, the blessing of short term memory.
Also, it was so easy to be entertained as a kid. Some of the most fun I had was playing imaginary games with my little brother. We would pretend to be superheroes, monsters, warriors, or whatever we wanted in worlds we created. Having toy swords or gadgets to use as props was a bonus, but we did not need them to enjoy ourselves.
It is sad that the simplicity of childhood is not something we can appreciate while we have it. Anyway, it is time to get to back to reality. I still need to find an internship.
