By Ethan Walshe
Editorial-in-Chief

I suppose I’m supposed to be overjoyed right now. I say this because I am finally done with high school, finally done with four formative years of my life. I am graduating. I am leaving the nest and moving on into what everyone else calls “real world” and the “real world” is full of its own wonders, the largest of which is of course independence.

Of course, the freedoms that accompany this new independence are beyond desirable, from making my own decisions, to handling my own money, to no longer being under the constant vigilance of my parents. Those are the things they tell you about.

What they fail to mention about the “real world” though, is that it’s terrifying. Or at least it terrifies me. The notion that I will be out there on my own, away from the comforts of my own home with actual responsibilities, is enough to make me never want to leave.

Soon enough, the days of lying on my couch, binge watching House of Cards for eight hours in an air conditioned home with a fridge full of food that I did not pay for will be long gone, a vision in the rearview mirror on my road trip through life.

This scares me. I’ve grown too accustomed to a life free of responsibility, as I would say most people my age have. We go about our days with reckless abandon, not realizing that that is a transient luxury. We will grow up, get jobs, have families, and never again be teenagers, enjoying an unreasonable amount of freedom that no eighteen-year-old should ever be trusted with.

So yes, there are great freedoms to come as we complete our dance on the cusp between high school and the “real world,” but too often we forget the ones we lose in the process. But that is what growing up is. It’s waking up one day to realize that you can’t just do whatever you want anymore, there are others to consider.

They also told you that these are the best days of our lives. They are wrong. These are the best days of our lives so far. Yes, I’ve made it sound like the future is a nightmarish world filled with uncertainty at every turn, but that’s not true. That is my eighteen-year-old mind trying to reconcile a twenty-something or thirty-something year old’s worldview with my own. It just doesn’t work that way.

So yes, there will be uncertainty, there will be responsibility, and there will no longer be the coveted reckless abandon that we know so well, but it will be replaced with happiness and independence. The best days of our lives do not fall under any time frame. They fall where we want them to and where we choose to make them.

Tennyson once told us “to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” I can think of no more perfect way to describe what I wish for the future. I will strive past my fear of what is to come, only to find myself seeking happiness. And when I find it, I will not yield to my previous fears.

To paraphrase Fight Club, I am at a very strange time in my life. We all are. But we’re going to be okay. We are going to be just fine.