To be quite honest, as a teenage girl I don’t handle this kind of thing well. When you first told me I honestly couldn’t breathe. I wasn’t sure what to think. There were a million things whirling through my head all at once.
“Was it something I did?”
“Is there someone else?”
And by then end of this thought process I stopped looking for a why and started looking for a how.
“How could you do this when everything is going so well?”
“How could you just do this out of nowhere?”
My mind couldn’t process this. I laid in bed waiting for an epiphany; I just wanted to understand what was going on. I just laid in bed the rest of the night with “Breaking Up” by Charli XCX on repeat hoping that if I begun to recite it like a mantra I would actually believe it was true.
“Everything was wrong with you so breaking up was easy to do.”
I sang that line over and over again, although I was crying so much it was barely audible, and hoped that it would gain some kind of truth. This continued until I fell asleep.
I woke up the next day and threw up. I knew that I had stressed myself out so much that it made me ill but I stayed home from school anyways; I knew I couldn’t face you. I knew that if I saw you in the hallway I would break down. I couldn’t handle having to pass you in the hallway knowing that just yesterday we were walking together down that hallway.
I slept the day away and kept replaying last night’s events in my head over and over again.
“We’re too different it’ll never work out in the long run.”
“This is high school. I change my major once a day. I’m not exactly worried about the long run.”
“I’m sorry but it’s time for me to start thinking about the long run. Can we still be friends.”
“Sure. Actually, on second thought, I’m not sure we can ever be friends.”
This whole scenario keeps going through my head like a movie on a continuous loop and I can’t turn it off unless I’m sleeping, so that’s what I did.
When I woke up I felt the urge to text you like I did any other day.
“How was your day?”
“I miss you.”
I almost sent you a snapchat and then I stopped myself. I couldn’t tell you that I missed you. I had to stay strong. You meant, you still mean, the world to me. You used to tell me that quite a lot.
“You mean the world to me.”
And I would smile and you would smile and then you would kiss me and we’d just curl up together in front of the fire and watch movies. The course of events from yesterday just seemed surreal to me. What was I supposed to do? Say that I’d give up my dream of moving to Seattle to stay in this small town in the middle of nowhere with you? I couldn’t do that. I didn’t want that. I know better than to give up what I want for some high school boy. I’ve done it before and he ended up hurting me. I just wanted us together as long as we could be. I guess that wasn’t very long.
Why my Disease Screwed me Over
The question of “What are you going to do with your life?” keeps popping up in conversation; whether the conversation is with a teacher of mine, a classmate, a family member, or just an acquaintance, they all seem to be interested in my future. I normally fake a smile and give them a random career because, in all honesty, I have absolutely no clue what I’m going to do with the rest of my life and that terrifies me. One day I wake up and think, “I want to write for the rest of my life,” and the more practical part of me thinks, “You have Crohn’s medication that with insurance costs about $20,000 a month. You need a stable full-time job by the time you’re twenty-six and off of your dad’s insurance or you might end up dead.”
Every career field I lean towards is impractical: music, English, creative writing, theatre, education. In this country’s economic state we’ve made so many cuts to education, especially arts education, and jobs in arts education are very sparse. My biggest fear isn’t even not knowing what I’m going to do with my life. It’s not knowing if I’ll have a job that provides good health insurance and keeps me alive that terrifies me.
People always tell me that I should pick a career I’m passionate about and that it’s better to do something you love doing rather than something that makes a lot of money. In my case, however, I feel as though the latter is the better option. Majoring in something like engineering will give me a job with the benefits I need right our of college whereas with some form of education who knows if I will even have a job right out of college let alone a job with good benefits. This has me in fear; I second guess everything on a daily basis, yet I always end up back in the same place: a degree in music education and English education with a minor in theatre. This path is one that will probably get me nowhere in life, but this path is one that will make me extremely happy. At least if I choose this career path I die from lack of medication, I’ll die happy.
American Youth: an Essay
“What are you going to do with the rest of your life?”
“Have you taken your SAT yet?”
“Do you know what you want to major in?”
“What colleges are you interested in?”
You can barely make it through your AP Calculus class. What makes you think you are going to make it to college? You have spent all of this time consummating. Ever since you were a young matron you knew your life was incumbent on going to a selective college like Columbia, which is located in New York, New York, or Harvard, which is located near Boston, Massachusetts, but now, as you draw near to college application time, you know that you have to be bounteously realistic. It is of poor prospect that schools like those will take someone with your grade point average; it may be an A but it is still not altitudinous enough for Harvard’s canonical standards. You know the pressure is on and you have to centralize your consciousness on school. As a young American in high school, the priority of your utmost importance at this moment is getting into a good college so that you can live a prosperous life.
You have now come to the adjudicature that an ivy league is no longer your dream, yet you refuse to settle for a school that accepts anyone who maintained a B average. You optate Reed College, a small, private college in Portland, Oregon; it may have a thirty-six percent acceptance rate but it is the only place you want to go. You are willing to do whatever it takes to get in to Reed. You focus on your AP Calculus and your AP English and study countless hours for your SAT. You know that if you do not get into college that you are going to end up asking people “Would you like fries with that?”
People continue interrogating you with questions such as , “Have you decided on a major yet?” and “Are you going to be a doctor, a lawyer, or an engineer?” You would hate to disappoint them when you tell them that you are going to apply to a small liberal arts college to study English and music, so instead you lie and say “I think I want to study aerospace engineering at CalTech,” which is not a lie in its entirety, you have contemplated that option; every time you consider a new major you just go straight back to English and music. You cannot see yourself being anything other than a writer, or a teacher, or, if you happen to be lucky, a musician. However, in America today, careers in liberal arts are not as plentiful as those in engineering, and as an American teen you struggle to establish harmony between passion and practicality.
Everyone around you keeps pressuring you; they try to persuade you to attend their alma mater or follow their career path. You politely say you will look into it and go back to working on your regional music. You know that if you can make all-states that you have a good shot at getting the district scholarship next year. You also know that all-states looks really good when applying to schools as a music major, and at this point you are willing to do anything to make your application a standout. Your efforts so far have been fruitful, you qualified for regionals; you made it into the top ten of thirty-two girls that closely resemble yourself. You know you are exceptional but you wonder if that is enough to make all-states, if that is enough to get into college. As you near the closing of your junior year of high school you begin to fret; you know that if you cannot figure everything out soon you will never be able to succeed because in America, in this day and age, you are not considered competent enough for a career without the possession of a college degree. As an adolescent in America, you cannot help but worry about whether you will amount to a lucrative white-collar business person or a mediocre proletarian.
You devote yourself to studying for your advanced placement courses and rehearsing your music, because you know that you never want to see yourself become that proletarian. Your daily schedule consists of jazz band before school, then school, and then you get home and you practice each instrument for an hour, succeeded by singing for two hours, followed by doing your calculus homework and writing that essay for English. Somewhere in that tedious schedule you also have to find the time to get sleep. Your brain cannot percolate without your standard six hours of sleep. Somewhere in that schedule you also try to maintain a social life, because you are indeed still a youthful adolescent, but with the plentitude of activities you have going on you never have time for friends.
You are under so much pressure, so much stress, that you are becoming deranged. You are prone to breakdowns. You question your life and every aspect of it. Your only desire is to make something consequential of yourself. You supplicate answers to all of those questions of moment. You have a sanguine expectation that everything will work out; you will get accepted to Reed College, you will obtain your dream job, and you will live happily ever after. After all, you are, in fact, an American teen.
Lovesick
Have you ever looked at a person and just thought, “Wow, they’re really beautiful.”? You don’t think “Wow they’re really hot.” or “Wow they’re really attractive.” but instead you find them beautiful, intriguing. It’s as though for a split second the world stops and the only thing you can see is this beautiful person, this walking masterpiece. Everything about them is intriguing; their hair, their style, that copy of Dante’s Inferno they’re holding attract you to them. No matter how much you try to erase their face from your memory it’s all you can see. In your sleep, in your day dreams, you think you see them in the grocery store but you know it isn’t plausible considering you live seventy miles apart, no matter how hard you try you can’t forget them. You’re aware that you will never see them again, but you just can’t help but hope that something, some sort of fate, will bring you together again so that you can finally get up the courage to talk to them. How can this be? How can you be so in love without ever uttering a word to the person you’re “in love” with. Your hormones are messing with your head again. You can’t help but obsess over this one person, this one being that seems to have every bit of your attention devoted to them. When you think about them you seem to hear “Hopelessly Devoted” from Grease playing in your head. You know that you are out of your mind, delusional, insane, but you can’t help the fact that you’re lovesick. When you’re in love there is no logic, nothing makes sense to you, and you can’t seem to care, but that’s okay. You’re a teenager, it’s okay to be lovesick, it’s okay to let the hormones take control, because in the end you will be wiser than you once were.
Survival Quit 