“God, Mom I’m 15 let me live me life!” I would scream while slamming doors at the fact that, once again my mom wasn’t letting me go to another party. I reminisce on high school and laugh at how dumb we all were. When “going out” meant drinking $10 vodka in water bottles that someone had gotten from their older brother, in their basement and with their parents asleep upstairs. High school seemed like my whole world at the time, so naturally when drama would unfold it felt like my world was crashing down. I thought that who I was in high school was who I would be for the rest of my life; I thought it would determine how popular I was forever and whether boys would like me. I couldn’t have been more wrong. God only knows why 16-year-olds think that they are on top of the world.

I look back and am genuinely grateful for all of the stupidity that went on in high school for teaching me that there is life beyond my little suburban town. I thought that my town was the center of the universe and that at age 15 I was old enough to get “hammered” every weekend. Believe it or not, your world is not ending when your best friend stabs you in the back or when you don’t get asked out by that hot guy. If only my high school self could see some of the stories my college self has to tell…

From age 13 on, growing up is a such a bittersweet time. Sometimes I think about if I could go back and pick my little 16-year-old self up and tell her to stop crying over another dumb boy or to stop worrying about what people were saying about her. I would soon learn that these people who everyone idolized would peak in high school. I used to ignore every adult who would look down at me and sweetly tell me “how old I’ve gotten” or how they “used to remember when I was so little”. ‘Please’ I would say to myself, ‘I just want to be 18 so I can get the hell out of here.’ But your mom always seems to be right. Who would’ve thought moms actually knew what they were talking about.

Sure enough, my first year of college I would call my mom crying from 1,000 miles away saying I wanted to come home. I couldn’t understand why I wasn’t happy every second of my day like I expected to be in college. It wasn’t until I was bawling my eyes out at the airport to go back for my sophomore year that I realized what everyone was talking about. Life is never going to be the perfect breeze that T.V. shows falsely portray to hopeless teenage girls around the country. It was until then that I realized that holding yourself back from experiencing life was how people ended up becoming regulars at their hometown bar just trying to relive their glory days for the rest of their lives. I realized I could finally do all the things I would never have dared to try in high school. By the end of my sophomore year I found myself being lame and emotional at the thought of how fast college was going.

I’m sitting here as a junior in college now realizing that I am 110% a different person than I was just a few years ago. People laugh when I call myself old but I look at all the freshmen wishing I could go back. Amazingly enough, there is life after high school. Who would’ve thought?! My friends and I make fun of some of the horrible things that our high school selves did in such disbelief that we were ever that strange. Yet, somehow I wouldn’t trade any of the psychotic things I did for the world. They made my naïve younger self grow up and learn a lot about life whether they were good experiences or bad. I’ve learned how to live in the moment, how to be happy and how to do what makes me happy. Life will never be as glamorous as my younger self-thought, but then what kind of crazy, embarrassing stories would we even have to show for it?