As I sit here and write this article, I am five days away from turning 20 years old. I am about to move to the camp that I work at over the summer. I am surprising my parents by cooking dinner for them tonight. I have "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" playing on the television. I have some packing to do before I move tomorrow, but I figure that I can put it off for just a little longer.

In the midst of this all, I realize that my childhood is coming to an end. I will no longer be a teenager. I guess you could say that it is the end of an era. There will no longer be tree houses and forts that my brothers and I threw together. My cousins and I will not be playing in the seasonal creek at the house that my grandparents lived in. I will no longer spend hours chasing my dogs around the hill that my parents live on. The days of running through the sprinkler, eating blue popsicles and living carefree during the summer are over. It is time to move on from that.

Moving on from being a child does not mean that you forget it all. I will always have memories of a road trip that my family took to Indiana one summer. The instrument panel in our gold mommy mini van going down and the panic of banging our fist on it to know how fast we were driving will be forever embedded in my brain. Falling down in the snow and rolling down a small hill, all the while giggling, will be a memory that stays with me forever.

Your memories shape who you are. They give you your personality, your habits and they make you who you are as a person. They change your future, depending on your experience with a certain situation. They give you the discernment to tell right from wrong. Your experiences are what makes you, you.

To be out of your teens is to move on with your life. High school is now in your past, and it needs to stay there. You will still have those memories and experiences, but you are now beyond that. To be looked at as an adult, you must act like one. Being an adult means that you take care of yourself. It means that you leave things behind you that need to be left behind, you move on and you look at what is ahead of you.

I am not saying that being an adult is to totally leave everything of your past behind you. There are still days that you need to eat some dinosaur chicken nuggets, watch a silly cartoon or re-read a small novel that you read in elementary school. Being an adult is finding the balance between all of that, and using wisdom and discernment through all of it.