Have you ever had one of those irrepressible moments in which you just feel utter sadness and lack of control for your future? I have. I wonder if you, my reader, know what I am describing, because I can’t even put a finger on it as I’m typing. My mind feels the same emotions, but my fingers can’t seem to reciprocate the anxiety, the bitterness, the lost love, the future in which I anticipate but am also completely petrified. Have you ever felt this way? Or am I just a slave to my own sub-conscious wondering and waiting what the future has in store for me. If I could, I would stay where I am now. Because somehow, I’m in love with this sadness and with how my life has progressed from three years ago when I had entered an all-girl’s academy. Maybe, though my life is very different from yours, because surely we are all different, you can relate to these feelings of change and anticipation of life moving faster than you can expect.

I never felt connected to my high school experience. I never felt connected to the girls there. I never felt connected to my highest potential. Last year, I believed in myself, and I grew in academic intelligence and self-awareness, encompassing the feelings and needs of other people. Everything was going well because I had worked hard for what I wanted in the future. But, if we fast forward to now, to senior year, I’m breaking beneath the cracks. Everyone puts a label on me, that I’m the perfect girl. Do they know that I used to cry every night about the boy that had hurt me the weekend before? About the girls that would make fun of me for being an over-achiever, for telling a teacher about a friend’s drinking problems? I was sadness. I was depressed. Yet, this summer going into senior year, I had an epiphany-like experience. I’m happy, and I love like I’m supposed to love. This school-year is the best year of my life. I love my sisters, and I feel very connected to the community. But, I still cry sometimes. I stay up late at night when the boy and best friend I’ve loved for two years had told me he had committed to a prestigious university on the West Coast. Do you know how I felt? Behind this “perfection” and persona I invite people to look at, I’m breaking. Not because I’m sad like years before but because everything is going faster than I can control. I was only starting to get acquainted with this happiness.

I want to invite you into my experience of sadness; maybe you can relate. He told me he had two options – one university on the East Coast that is very close to the liberal arts college I would like to attend and a university on the West Coast that is farther away than anything to me. He had been there for me for two years. He has everything I feel the man of the future exemplifies: incredible discipline, intelligence, positivity, warmth, resilience, sensibility, integrity, leadership and full of goodness. I didn’t want to be selfish, but I had prayed he would pick the school that would keep us close together. He was making his decision for two days, and for those days, I didn’t have the opportunity to communicate with him. But, I had the worst feeling in the pit of my stomach. I knew he wanted to go to California, and I stayed up until 3AM that morning crying because life has gone too fast for me to grasp onto it and to allow it to cling within the grapple of my future. I sat on my bedroom floor with the door locked like countless nights prior to this one and stared at the ceiling listening to “The Moon” by the Swell Season. I didn’t feel any control. Senior year had just started, and it was already December. And that’s when I realized that my whole life, I had run out of time. Time. Can you believe that? Because the night he told me he had picked the school on the West Coast, and my intuition had been correct, he told me we had lots of time together. We have eight months. But, like everything else, these months will fly by, and soon we won’t be in contact anymore. I’m predisposed to believe this because that’s what every other person that has left has done to me. Once they’re gone, we never talk. And though the circumstance allows for this to happen, because life moves so fast, people change, and their busyness allows for little interaction between the people they once knew, I don’t feel at all the same. If I could have it my way, I would stay here forever in senior year. I’m happy here, and I’m scared about the future. I want to go to medical school one day and be the answer for the future, smiling at a patient that believes I am their last resource they have for a miracle, but I’ll always be the same girl I am at this very moment.