High school prepares us for just one thing - college.
We spend our teenage years perfecting our reading, writing, and arithmetic. We try to get good grades. We join the right clubs. We volunteer when we have the chance.
All this just to impress a stranger in some far away college admissions office who gets paid to sift through thousands of applications that, in some way or another, resemble our own. To them, we’re just another name from just another school with yet another list of mundane extracurriculars and mediocre test scores.
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It takes more than just some good grades to fully prepare for college, though. College is about preparing. But what if, when you arrive on campus that first day of your freshmen year, you don’t know what you want to do? What if all you’ve worked for - your good grades, your clubs and your sports - are all deemed useless the day that you graduate? What if you’ve wasted the majority of your life in a classroom trying to earn an A when what you’re supposed to be doing, what they don’t tell you to do, is figure out what you want to do for the rest of your life?
I feel like I’ve just been living in this comfort zone for the past 17 years - one where I don’t make decisions, but rather, decisions are made for me.
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Now I feel like I’m running out of time to make my biggest decision ...
What do I want to do with the time I’m given?
It seems like everyone already has an answer to that. They know where they want to be in one year, four years, 10 years. I don’t even know where I’m going to be tomorrow.
I’ve always been incredibly indecisive - to the point where I have trouble picking out which breakfast cereal I want - and I knew that one day that trait would hold me back. I just don’t want some cookie-cutter future where everything seems perfect when it’s not. As impossible as it is, I want to know that things are perfect. I want to be happy.
That’s where I want to be in 10 years.
It’s just that I don’t know how to get there quite yet.
-Chelsea McDonnell
The RHS Creative Writing blog posts are part of an interactive collaboration between Vernon Patch and Victoria Nordlund's advanced creative writing class. Each student in the class writes a blog post once per week and the class votes on which ones to publish on Vernon Patch.
