Since starting back up the new school year just a couple weeks ago, I’ve been having this weird feeling in the pit of my stomach. It took me awhile to give a name to it, but I finally realized what it is: impending adulthood. Look, I know being almost 22 years old makes you pretty much a young adult, but this feeling is different. There is a wide range of things I’ve avoided doing or realizing in my life because of being labeled in the “student” category of young adulthood. By May of next year, I will no longer be a student, and that blows my mind.
Now, you may be thinking that I am blowing this way out of proportion, and I probably am. Yet that is the strange beauty of this new weird feeling! It is a whole new adventure, a completely new chapter in my life that is about to start and it’s going to start whether or not I am ready. No one is ever going to be completely ready for when a change is about to happen. It’s just not possible; life is too confusing to ever be consistent, so you have to find the balance of being on your toes and going with the flow. To be honest, I am really scared about this long chapter in my life ending, and that is 100% okay. Change is crazy and nerve-wracking, and everybody deals with it differently, but you have to remain headstrong and push through it. That is what I have to do with this pit of impending adulthood I feel; just push through it.
I guess the reason I even decided to talk about this is because there are things in my life that happened that I have never been able to truly move past, but being on the edge of this precipice into complete adulthood made me realize a few things.
One of the things I realized by giving a name to this feeling is that this is the time to treasure what is most important to me. My relationships with my loved ones, my career, my little hobbies, all of these things bring me joy. During this transitional time in my life, I need to appreciate and love them more than ever, because who knows where the future is going to take me. I just don’t know, so instead of just hoping for the best, I am going to put my energy into the people and things that mean the most to me.
The second thing I realized is that even though I sometimes fear change, there is nothing to be afraid of, because you can’t control it. Life I said before, it’s going to happen whether you’re ready or not. While there are things in life you can control, the universe works in peculiar ways and can throw a curveball, score a touchdown, and win the gold medal all in the blink of an eye. You might get a little bit of vertigo from whatever just happened, but you keep moving forward. The future isn’t here yet; we’re still in the present, enjoy it.
The last thing that I realized that relates to appreciating the now is you really don’t know where you’re going to end up in your future. I’ve seen countless examples of this throughout my life, but you don’t really understand until you see where you came from to where you are now. I never thought I was going to make it this far in life. While this may sound weird or privileged depending on how you view that statement, you never truly know someone until you walk in their shoes, and what that person is going through may be different from your situation. That doesn’t diminish the feelings they have though; every person has valid feelings, no matter their