I am a busy college student (like many of you) who has a schedule so jam packed that it feels like there are only 12 hours in a day, not 24. Like many of you, I also feel a sense of emptiness as I fill my life with somewhat meaningless opportunities outside of my classes as I try to make myself feel better about the cold hard facts. What are those cold hard facts? The answer: I am close to $11,000 in debt, closing in on what will be close to $20,000. I also am going to graduate and go on and teach (which is NOT A BAD PROFESSION) and make less than what I need to make to pay off all of the debt I am going to be acquiring. Another fact: I feel like I don’t fit in; conversation stops when I come into a room, or people just can’t hold a conversation with me. (This may not be completely true, but the teenage mind still works at 19 years old.) This feeling of teenage angst and emptiness is something that can be cured by self-improvement, and that is different for everyone. There is one thing I need to do to make myself feel semi-better about my situation; do something completely crazy.

I know this “crazy thing” won’t change my situation at all, but it will change my perception of the situation I am in. Perception, especially in the world we live in today, helps me understand different angles to each situation so that I can hopefully learn and move forward with my life. Now when I say “crazy” I don’t mean drop out of school and start campaigning for Donald Trump full time, but maybe get a tattoo or do stand-up comedy…who knows. This crazy thing will cause me to accept that life is going to get harder, and even though I will have more debt than my parents did, everything will be okay. Doing something crazy will just affirm the faith that I need to have in myself. If I am going to be honest, I feel like I can’t do anything because someone always seems to be better than myself. Even though I try so hard, I feel like someone else will always win that gold medal. That is the truth, and I honestly cannot accept it anymore. I want to feel like the reason that I am here on earth is to have some sort of voodoo magic over those that I am around.

I need this crazy thing in my life to happen; I need to feel like I am doing more than just taking up room on earth. So yes, I will be doing something crazy and you will probably hear something about it. And yes, this crazy thing may fill the emptiness growing inside me like a middle-aged woman’s need to be younger, but I have learned this past summer that crazy is not so far away from normal as I thought it was. It was only my perceptions that got in the way of that.