This summer, I'll be graduating. In the Fall, I'll be attending college in pursuit of a journalism major and hopefully continuing work on my novel(s). All of this is happening far too quickly in my opinion, and it's kind of scary.
I mean, I can still remember myself walking into my fourth grade classroom and feeling grown up. It's a ridiculous memory for me now, but it's still nice to know that at one point I wasn't nervous about the next thing to come. Now that I'm a legal adult who is about to begin college however, I feel as though I'm starting all over again. Not to mention it doesn't help that I'm only going to college because being in the process of writing novels doesn't pay the bills, but a beginning career in journalism does. So college is kind of in a fog for me; it's like I'm going to only appease my parents and to go through the motions everyone else does. I'm not even going for my true passion, and that freaks me out.
In addition to college, I have to start thinking about too many other things. In the back of my mind I know that I've got book fees to think about, an aging car to keep in mind, and the constant reminder from my conscious that I need to start saving more money than I make so I can make it out of this obnoxiously conservative state. I have to pick out a doctor soon too, and with an emerging genetic crap shoot of medicinal issues, that sucks too.
Everyone around me is growing the same way too, and as it stands, I only have one friend remaining in Fort Wayne after high school. Everyone else is moving away to pursue their individual career paths. I guess it's just difficult for me to deal with the idea of never again seeing certain faces that I have grown accustomed to over my past 12 years of schooling. So there's that.
The truly funny thing is that all throughout elementary school I wanted to be a grown up. I wanted to be a big exciting high school guy, who was ready by the end of school to grab life by the metaphorical bull horns and make the most of my opportunities. In middle school, I remember just wanting to escape the hell that was the formation of cliques and the torments that were my obvious differences from everyone around me. It's a feeling I'm sure every middle schooler had. In high school, I just wanted everything to slow down. I wanted time to stop so I could spend even a few more days with my closest friends, sit down to one more truly awful school lunch, and just feel surrounded by the individuals I had grown up with.
