When in school, you are always on your A-game. You have a planner with 10 different activities from 9 a.m to 11 p.m. every single day. You start preparing for your exams weeks in advance, and spontaneity is not an often occurrence during your semester. But what happens in the summer? You're either bound to a fully-loaded internship or working effortlessly in preparation for your next year. But your whole summer shouldn't be about that. That's why it is called a Summer Vacation.
Summer is the time to look back on the person that you became during the semester. Either that person was super ambitious and got the job offering right in the beginning or that person was able to succeed in their hardest classes for their major, or maybe, you were neither. Maybe last semester you were struggling not just to get ahead but to keep up, and maybe you constantly felt that you will always being lagging behind the rest. But summer is not the time to continue stressing about these fears.
As teenagers and young adults today, our major threat is not drugs, or gangs, or rebellion. Our biggest problems are our stress and depression, and the belief that we need to be perfect and fit a certain silhouette in order to be capable of "making it" in society. Our parents can't help but remind us that our generation is the generation without jobs and without money. This is probably the worst news for us to hear because this generation is probably the most ambitious, the most culturally aware, and the most stressed out generation there ever was before. And this means our "breaks" no longer feel like breaks. Anytime we are left with idle time, it feels as if we lack focus, or lack enthusiasm, or are just plain lazy. But has anyone ever taken a look into how our previous generations lived at our ages?
For what seems like hundreds of years, summer vacation has always remained crucial to the lives of young adults. It is not only a time to not be in school, it is also a time to change and grow without being tested or quizzed. It is why when we were younger, we always noticed the most significant changes in people from the time stretches of summer vacation. The most of what changes us is not the career path we pursue but the experiences that we pursue to change us.
Summer time is a time to pursue something different, whether that be through your internship in a field you are trying out, a relationship with a new person you met at the beach, an international job where you get to learn a new culture, or from just staying at home and deciding if the people you need in your life are the ones right in your own neighborhood. Whatever the choice may be, you want to be the person that grows from their summer experience. Don't be that college student that comes back just the same as they were before: entitled, selfish, and boring. Don't let summer keep you unmovable. Let your summer move you.
