They tell us to stay young forever and yet they make fun of us for living in the moment and being young. They tell us when we're just old enough to still think coloring is a good way to spend time that we should never grow up and that we should embrace everything but once we get to the age where we can start driving or start making decisions for ourselves, they suddenly tell us to grow up and stop hanging onto our childhood. Maybe they're right, maybe they're wrong, who really knows?

But as I'm typing this on the day before I leave my teenage years behind and enter adulthood, I'm going to tell you something that I think is very important, don't let your childhood dreams leave you. Don't let how you used to look at the world be altered by how you are going to see it as you grow older and find out that a lot of things are different than how you thought they would be when you were twelve years old and thought you could be someone big and important. You can be someone big and important if you work for it. Don't let the world tell you that your dreams are stupid and not worth pursuing because there are a lot of successful people nowadays that were told the exact same thing and look where they are now. So pursue them, dammit. I used to want to be a writer before I started looking into film and graphic design. Do you know how long it has been since I wrote something that wasn't an essay for class or an article for the Odyssey? (And shout out to my editor, Amber Wibbenmeyer. I'm so sorry for all the typo's and grammatical errors you probably have to fix, there's a reason I didn't want to be an editor.) Years, it's been years and I completely miss it. And the only reason why I stopped was because someone told me it wouldn't make a difference in the world, that any story I could come up with has already been written. But you know what? I don't care if it doesn't make a difference in the world, as long as it makes a difference in someone's life. And it doesn't matter if it's already been written because I know for a fact, it hasn't been written from my own perspective. Do you know how many different stories there are about a teenage girl falling in love with a vampire/werewolf? Yeah. A lot. So I'm going to go back and finish all the stories I started even if I'll be the only one to read them.

There are so many people out there who think that this generation and the next have nothing to give to this world but I think that's a load of crap. But the problem is that there are so many people telling us that we can't do something and so many of us believing that and giving up before we even have a chance to prove them wrong. Get off your butt's and do something to prove them wrong, that's all I'm asking. They would stop if we showed them we were capable of something great. It won't be all that it's cracked up to be, though, I know that. There are so many things that can try to break us down and lose that "something bright" that each and every one of us has; break ups, death, loss, self-esteem, politics, etc. So, yeah, they may tell you as you grow older to lose every dream you ever had but I want you to hold on to those dreams because those are the stuff that's going to push you to be better, better than the 'you' you were yesterday and better than the generation before you and isn't that all that matters?