Miss not-so-independent

Senior year. Easy classes, your lasts of high school starts, prom, graduation. The one year that every high school student looks forward to the day they start freshman year. Strangely enough, I don’t.

There are many pros to being a junior approaching your senior year. The number one is that you’re almost free from what you’ve been stuck in for 12 years of your life. You’re coming upon that time of your life when you turn the big 18 and feel like an adult, but you’re really not because you’re still under your parents roof. Many people think, “Wow, I want to be gone now!” And again, I do not think that way.

Senior year means growing up. It means becoming an adult, which don’t get me wrong, I want to be an adult and to be on my own. But this is the time when we start applying for colleges, we start thinking about what we’re going to do with our lives. This is our make-or-break decision, and that’s terrifying. I am not the girl who is so excited to go to college and leave. I am not the one who is excited to apply for college and act like I have it all together. If we’re being quite honest here, half of us put on this facade that we have it all figured out. But I cannot do that.

The most frightening part of senior year has to be the day you walk across the stage, and you may be reading this and thinking, “This girl is crazy and a little scaredy cat.” But the day you walk is the day your high school years end. At that moment, you’re done. It’s a relief but a heavy burden at the same time. The past four years flew by. So you think what’s next? For some of us, we don’t know what’s next. I couldn’t tell you right now what I’m going to study in college because I can’t figure it out. It changes day by day. College doesn’t appeal to me like it does to other people. College, to me, is a place that is just down right scary. You don’t have Mom or Dad there for you now. You’re alone. And yeah, they’re “a phone call away,” but it’s that security of being able to just walk into the next room to talk to them that’s not there anymore. The people you’ve relied on for 18, almost 19 years, are not going to be able to make you dinner or wash your clothes, and that’s a hard adjustment. It’s a hard thought, one that makes me want to stay home for as long as I can.

Most teenagers at this point of their life think of their hometown as a prison. I cannot tell you how many times I have heard or seen the words, “Get me out of here,” or “This town sucks,” but when the time comes, and you’re no longer in high school and you’re going off to college, you’re leaving everything behind. Your family, your boyfriends/girlfriends and friends, your memories, everything. And that just makes me have a fear of leaving it all. Don’t get me wrong. Like I said earlier, I want to become an adult and be able to fend for myself, but it all comes so quickly. One day you’re throwing your cap into the air thinking “Thank you Jesus, I’m free,” then two months later, you have an empty bedroom in your home. You’re on your way to your new home for the next four years. You say goodbye to everyone and your old life, turn around and start your new one as an adult, a college kid, living the dream of being on your own. It’s a very unnerving thought, one that makes me cringe because it’s really hard to process. The emotion, the relief, the new burden it brings, the everything, it’s hard to think about. It makes me want to stay home.

Senior year. The time I should be rejoicing. The time I should know what I will do with my life. But I don’t. And senior year is just that scary year that I can’t look forward to.