I’m sitting in a coffee shop half a mile from my house — the house I’ve lived in my entire life. It’s nestled next to the 7-11 where we would get slurpees and nerd ropes in middle school and the hardware store filled with the strangely comforting scents of gasoline and wood chippings. I’m looking out over the parking lot where we used to loiter on Friday nights after high school football games, trying to figure out where we could get beer. From strep throat and sinus infections to chicken pox and poison ivy, my mom has picked up probably 100 prescriptions from the pharmacy across the street. My elementary school is around the corner, and the boy I fell in love with in 11th grade lives just a block away.
Over the past few weeks, people have constantly been asking me, “How does it feel to be graduating in December? Can you believe it?” Other than feeling really ready to be done with late nights in the library, I hadn’t been feeling much of anything. I was so numb to the idea and so sick of the questions that on Thanksgiving, I just sighed and shrugged my shoulders.
But I’m sitting here in this coffee shop and I’m starting to feel the truth of it — I’m graduating in three weeks and this little world of mine will become some kind of memory of the childhood I don’t really belong to anymore. I’m about to be a grown up. No exceptions this time.
I’m not exactly sure what to do with this impending “grown-upness” or what it really means. Do I run away to a foreign country? Do I settle down with the familiarity of family and friends? Do I go straight to grad school or do I wait a few years? Do I start my career or do I wait tables for a while? There’s no formula, no path laid out for me, and for some reason, the freedom I should see as such a gift really scares me.
Throughout life so far, I’ve always been told exactly what to do next. I’ve lived in this calculated sequence of events: Wake up, go to school, go to lacrosse practice, come home, eat dinner, do my homework, go to bed, wake up and do it all over again. Get through middle school, get into a gifted high school program, get straight A’s, get into U.Va., get straight A’s at U.Va.…and then what?
Some people might say: “Do whatever you want! The world is your oyster!” My response is, the world is more like 142 million square miles of dark and scary ocean, and I don’t even know how to swim.
It’s funny how I used to think grown-ups had it all together — my teachers were perfect and my parents had exactly what they wanted — when in reality, all of us are holding onto a mess of pieces that can fall apart in an instant.
I can already tell you my “grown-up” self is going to screw up innumerable times. I’m far from immune to poor career choices, divorce, illness or injury. But my own mess of broken pieces will form an incredible mosaic of colorful stories, despite recurring mistakes.
I guess that’s the beauty in our brokenness. We’ll hurt people, we’ll forget to love ourselves and we’ll live through days feeling like we don’t really want to live at all. But we’ll also have moments when we are so full of life we can hardly breathe, when the whole world is shining around us and we feel immeasurably and infinitely loved in spite of it all.
Peyton’s column runs biweekly Wednesdays. She can be reached at p.williams@cavalierdaily.com.
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