I was born into the role of the younger sibling. Four short years later I took my rightful place as the middle child.

The stigma is that the middle children are the unloved ignored ones. Quite the opposite for myself in my family, but then again I might have subconsciously made myself hard to ignore because of that position.

I became the middle of the sandwich to every situation to my life. I have held things together even when they were starting to fall apart and I had declared myself peace keeper. As I got older I learned to move on and let go as well as keep myself from being tied to toxic experiences or even allowing myself to be placed into a situation that would make me unhappy.

Now that I am beyond a decade past my first welcoming to being the middle I have gained a new voice in arguing strong opinions.

I am a walking stereotype for college students during an election. I am voting for the party that my older relatives and those of more conservatives would declare as the less educated choice that only school and travel can educate me on. As if age had an effect on knowledge capacity. Just this afternoon I watched a short clip of a five-year-old multiplying numbers in his head that I probably couldn't solve without a calculator or at least a pen and paper. Our generation has paved a younger one that doesn't know a life without technology. Here I have found myself in the middle again. I am in between two generations. One that doesn't know the luxury of not having internet to come home to or how unneeded cellphones are to keep friendships going. They won't know how exciting it was to finally be able to talk on the landline for over an hour. We are latching on to past times of those before us. Making vinyls a fad in order to bring back a lost treasure.

I feel like I am in a constant battle with declaring myself an under-stander of old things and moving into the mass as just another technology driven zombie. I've been stamped with the term 'old soul' that so many family members and close friends have agreed upon, but I still find myself forgetting all about the countless nights of no phones or computers. I still remember when my parents got their first cellphones and never used them. I wont ever be able to forget no matter how bad I want to, the sound that dial up internet makes. The simple toys were more entertaining than the video games and they didn't require internet or being in doors. Monkey bars were more challenging than that next level in COD and you could never convince any of my siblings or myself that hide n' go seek wasn't the game of the century.

I see more people plugging into an outlet rather than a conversation and instead of gaining skills that allow you to be apart of something. We are working ourselves into isolation.

Not only are we walking away from past entertainments, but we are morphing relationship traditions into our modern image of how we think things work. Making ourselves more afraid of commitment. We are seeing a drop in marriages, a raise in divorce, and a countless tally of cheating horror stories.

We are seeing less high school drop outs, but less and less college graduates due to a declining job field. More young individuals are just starting their life with debt rather than being taught that the name of a school doesn't matter and nor does your job title if you wake up every day miserable.

We are all in the middle of a change.

I am in the middle of whether or not I think it's a good one or not. I have faith that humanity is to persistent on doing the good thing to let that victory escape us, but in this transitional process of being in the middle what values will we lose that we haven't already. We are closing the gaps that miles put in between family members and nations, but we can hardly communicate at a dinner table without the anxiety creeping into our brains that we want to, no, need to check our phones.

For now where I'll stand and probably forever is in the middle. One foot in the future and one foot in the past.