Remember when you were around six-years-old, and you would get put into a five-minute timeout? Remember how that five minutes felt like an eternity? What about when you were about to turn nine, but the two weeks until your birthday felt like they would never end? I definitely remember. Every day was long while the concept of a year seemed too big to really wrap my brain around. How I wish it were still that way.
Now, I feel like I blink and it’s already Friday of the next week. Time to submit another article, time for another rehearsal, time for yet another weekend packed full of newspaper interviews and homework. I laugh about making much life progress in a year, much less five. I mean, I’m almost halfway through the last semester of my fourth year of college, already?? How did that even happen?
I remember being 12-years-old and thinking about how grown up I would be when I was 16. I’d get to drive, I’d get to have a job, and I could go out with my friends whenever I wanted to and spend all of my time at the mall. I’m going to be 20 (yikes) in a few months, and I still don’t get to do all of that. Where does the time go?
Sometimes I wonder, does time really stay the same? Is that really the most consistent law of nature? Because it sure feels like it’s sped up to me. I no longer look at the age of 25 and think, “yeah, that’s when I’ll have everything together. I’ll have a job, I’ll be married, I’ll have kids and a dog and a house all of my own,” like I did when I was 16.
I also don’t look back at 18 and think how grown up I was. I always thought that once you were legally an adult, you’d feel like an adult, right? WRONG. I know I’m still a youngster and I have my whole life ahead of me to figure out how young I actually am right now (I can hear a chorus of “oh, sweetie, you have NO idea” as I am typing this), but in all reality I don’t feel any different than I did at 9, or at 12, or 16. It just feels like time has decided to speed up on me, and I’m left chasing after it like Peter Parker running after the big yellow school bus in that one “Spiderman” movie I liked to watch when I was little.
My world now consists of me carefully planning out each hour of the day and filling in each block of time with something that needs my immediate attention so that, maybe (hopefully), I’ll get a measly 45 minutes to myself? I know, I know. I’m lucky to even have that much time for myself, and it will only get harder and harder as time goes on. Inevitably, time will continue to speed up for me until one day I’ll blink and I’ll be 82 and still trying to figure out what it means to feel like an “adult.”
Until then, I guess I’ve just got to go with the time that I am given every day and work on making the most of it, even though it will never slow down enough for me to realize that I’m actually enjoying it. Time is weird, right? I’m just going to take a second to breathe now, and maybe blink again, and when I open my eyes, I wonder where I’ll find myself.
