Being a teenager is wrought with uncertainty, decisions, frustrations, and some of the best times of your life. But there are also some of the hardest times. How I can, having seen so little of life, be able to choose a career? Find a college? Know what I want to do with my life? Sometimes I want to give up. I feel in adequate and not ready. All this scares me, honestly. Wouldn't it just be easier to go back to elementary school, where college was just a distant unknown and the present delightfully simple?

I've always looked forward to being a "grown up", being able to do whatever I want to do and not having to be dictated by what a superior tells me. But now? Now that I'm so close to the age I longed to be all those years ago? I cower. I hide in the corner, I turn a blind eye, I pretend that it's too far in the future to worry about. But it's still there. Lurking. A source of excitement and something that scares me to death at the same time. It's part of growing up, I know, but that doesn't lessen the anxiety.


I wrote a new looking forward list last night. The list I'd written in early September helped me get through fall -- and even made me grow to adore it. And since I'm kind of dreading winter, and to help me see that the future isn't always bad, I wrote another one.