As the Ten Year Challenge is blowing up across all platforms of social media, people are left laughing at and reflecting on their past selves, seemingly in a rush to show off their new looks and mature presence to the world (or at least as much of the world is following them on social media). Seeing the plethora of pictures made me think about how we all rush to grow up, how we live in a world full of people continuously fighting to be treated like an adult without taking a second to breathe.

As people, we need to embrace our "nows," to fully let the cages that are our bodies inflate with all the feelings that we push against every day. The pain, the suffering, the joy are all aspects of what makes us human. We need to feel all of them. We cannot fully have good without bad. Without taking the time to embrace the negative feelings along with the positive, we can never really understand how much we appreciate those good times. It is like finding the "one," How many bad Tinder matches did you go through before you realized that the cute boy in your Chemistry class who also loves the Arctic Monkeys may actually be your perfect partner, rather than Chad who swears he supports women in his Tinder bio. We need to embrace the finite time we have on this earth by taking in everything it has to give us, even if we may not want to sometimes.

Even as a college freshman, time moves so quickly. I've done a lot of reflecting recently, and I have begun to go back to my heartbreaks, my failures, my best memories, and my successes. I go back to feel everything that I refused to feel as I was going through those life events. I put up steel walls that I pretend are impenetrable, until they aren't.

I remember being jealous of all of the older girls at my Bat Mitzvah. My cousins and the older girls I invited looked so mature and beautiful. My crooked smiles, weird hair part, and eyebrows that looked like they were commas on a sheet of paper were all that I could think about. I loved that night, I loved that party, and I love all of my family and friends that were there to support me as I became a Bat Mitzvah, however, even then, I was in such a rush to grow up. I never appreciated what it fully meant to grow, what it meant to break up with my middle school boyfriend and know that I could break up with someone if I felt as though I deserved more, what it meant to embrace my "now."

I don't want to be the girl that brushed over the little things that make me sad or happy and continue to move through life unattached to the majority of my emotions. I don't want to lay down one day, staring at the stars, missing what once was because I was always seeking for better. I want to breathe, I want to embrace, I want to fully experience this life. I want its pain, its torturous tricks, its good, and the moments that make me cry when I am so happy I just can't contain myself. That's what life is. It is the picture of you from 2009. It is the picture of you from 2019. It is all of the little moments in between. It is realizing that a decade moves way too fast, and if we don't change how we choose to live our lives, we will be out of "nows" before we learn to make them count.

So, breath, love, and open yourself up to the world around you before a Ten Year Challenge becomes a Fifty Year Challenge and you are wondering where all of the time went.