Season 1, Episode 5: Aging, and Other Fun Topics That Teenagers Like to Awkwardly Skirt Around in Conversation
Why hello there.
If you're here, I'd suggest you go make yourself a bag of microwaveable popcorn now, because I'm going to be a while. Don't worry. I'll wait.
There. All settled? Lovely. Me too.
As the title of this post suggests, this is probably going to be a lot of me brain-dumping all sorts of awkward conversation with you, my currently inanimate but in all (hopeful) actuality living, breathing, and existing audience.
I recently celebrated my "Exodus from the Womb" as a friend of mine so delicately phrased it, which makes me a legal adult now.
I thought that turning 18 would be... well... spectacular.
But it wasn't.
Don't get me wrong, I was over the moon to have celebrated it the way I did, which brings me to the first topic regarding aging, that is, my birthday itself.
Any of you who know me well know that I get terrible migraines, oftentimes with no warning signs, that can be ridiculously hard to deal with, and can lead to nausea, stomach pain, and other unpleasant symptoms.
Any of you who know me well would also have noted that my body chose my birthday of November 20th to throw one at me.
Allow me to give you a short synopsis of my day (with some stream of consciousness effects that would put Conrad Jarrett to shame)
Curtain rises on Amanda, sleeping, in bed. Her hair is disheveled in a way that isn't quite "cute and messy" but rather, "a hairball". She is lazily draped over the sheets and covers of her bed, with one hand under her cheek while another hangs dormant over the side of her bed. She is wearing one sock with blue and brown stripes, its match is nowhere to be found.
5:30 AM: My first alarm goes off. I feel sick. Great way to start off the day, Amanda. Nice job getting a cold on your birthday.
7:00 AM: I leave my house ew it's cold to arrive at the school at
7:18 AM: for an NHS meeting that started at 7:15, to which I am late Whyareyouherewhyareyouherewhyareyouhereeeeeeee
7:30-8:00 AM: I repeatedly shove cough drops down my throat in a wild attempt to clear it before the afternoon. If I have like 27 of these, it'll have to help, right?
8:00 AM: I remember that I have callbacks for the show that night Well at least I'm dressed well. Nice going on that one.
8:01 AM: I remember that I left my slides for the callback at home. WOW. Way To Go.
8:02 AM: I promptly panic.
8:45 AM: I begin my AP English test, and almost immediately feel sick to my stomach. Again. WHYAMIHERE
9:33 AM: I finally make it to photography where I, again, feel sick to my stomach. I finally find myself some medicine in my backpack, and then remember that I don't know how to take medicine without food. They're right there. IF ONLY I KNEW HOW TO DRY SWALLOW.
10:22 AM: I make it to my 4th period class, where I promptly perform the first number with the group, and then spend the rest of the class lying down in the back. At this point, you may as well just go home. Who cares if it's your birthday, if you feel this bad, and you don't have any food to take the medicine...it's not worth it.
11:06 AM: My friend Amanda (who goes out with me every day during our fifth period open) tells me I can ride in the back of her car while she stops at her house and comes back to the school. She brings me part 1 of my birthday present (a blanket) and says the rest is for later (I was supposed to sleep over at her house that night) and also brings me applesauce to take the medicine with. Life is good. I take the medicine and my body is at ease for a while. Great! So you got through that much. Now all you have to do is make it through your audition filming, and your callbacks and then you get to see Mitchell and Amanda tonight and everything will be golden.
If any of you know me, you should know by now that absolutely NOTHING goes according to plan with me. It's an unfortunate side-effect that comes with the territory. I should mention, before I continue, however, that the other four periods of the day were delightful. We watched my favorite APUSH video during 6th period; I was able to sleep off the last effects of my migraine in my study hall, 7th period; in 8th period AP Music Theory we watched a video of an orchestra, and in Choir, 9th period, we sang my favorite piece at the end of the day. It was really just the very beginning and the preface to the end that were awful.
3:11 PM: Amanda is waiting outside the choir room to film her video auditions for college. She is becoming more and more stressed out the longer she waits, because a) she was not informed that the choir room would be occupied directly after school, and b) her friend Mitchell, who was supposed to assist her in filming the auditions, has bailed on her and she is now left to fix everything on her own.
I pace. A lot. And then, when I finally enter the choir room- my voice is fine. Wow! I guess all those cough drops did you good, huh? This is the best you've sounded in weeks, maybe months!
4:35 PM: After receiving many frantic texts from a friend of mine telling me to get into the drama room for callbacks, I finally enter, and end up staying until approximately
6:15 PM: After which I go to check my phone only to find out that Amanda, my friend, has cancelled on me as well. Leaving me all alone on my birthday. Well this'll be fun. I can see it now, 'Youth Becomes Adult in Silence: No Friends Care to Spend Time on Birthday'.... okay maybe that's a bit dramatic, but really, alone on my birthday? All I wanted was to relax with Amanda tonight...
6:30 PM: I arrive home after driving in a swirl of snow (at this point in time the highlight of my day) only to have my parents tell me that there's a present for me downstairs, but it's too heavy for them to carry. (Parentspeak for: "Please go get our stuff") I distract them by talking about how awful my day was. Please. Everyone else cancelled on me, just let me vent about my day and then go sleep. PLEEEEEEAAAAAAASE.
6:35 PM: They tell me to go downstairs and get my present, so I walk downstairs. UGH such a hassle. (full confession, I'm probably the laziest person I know)
6:36 PM: SURPRISE. OHMYGOSHYOUDIDNT. BUT YOU DID. HOW. HOW DID YOU DO THIS? YOU GOT JOHNPAUL HERE? WHAT? AND JONNY? (For those of you who aren't in the loop, these are two friends of mine who live, respectively, 60 and 15 minutes away, and who I most certainly was NOT expecting to see in my basement)
From that moment on, the evening was lovely. The friends who had "bailed" on me were all (not shockingly) in my basement, and they all ended up throwing me the first successful surprise party that I've ever had (and ALWAYS wanted). That much was lovely.
But in turning 18, there was a lot more on my mind than just how to celebrate. I've been slowly realizing that each day that I have on Earth is pretty much wasted if I don't at least do something productive. In fact, I drove a friend of mine home earlier that week and we had talked about my "high school bucket list" and I confessed that it had started with ten things and I was now down to just one. "Wow, you've really been busy" he commented, a statement that I willingly agreed with in the moment, and yet, upon further consideration, felt wasn't accurate at all.
Yes, I had accomplished many of the things on my list.
I had broken a friendship and then rebuilt it (1).
I had performed my own music (2).
I had gotten a 5 on an AP test (3).
I had won the talent show (4).
I had had my art featured in the school (5).
I had found a poetry slam/club and joined it (6).
I had written a rap song (7).
I had tried something new and random every year (8).
I had performed my own poetry (9).
The only thing left was to write a book. Strange, right? If I had ever had the time, patience, or dedication for NaNoWriMo, it would've been amazing, but... I never did, and so that remains.
And yet, as my friend and I were talking, I began to think about how trivial all of these things were. For someone who was notorious for dreaming big, why were my high school goals so small?
And this is where the train of thought gets dangerous. As I began to ponder the real significance of my life thus far, I began to conclude that it was rather pointless, because, well, I really haven't done much in my eyes.
I've participated in things, and I've talked to people, but I kept on feeling that the more I thought about my "accomplishments" the more paltry they seemed. I mentioned earlier on that I wanted to perform my own poetry, yes? Well, my opportunity to do that is actually going to be happening in about 6 hours, seeing as this post will be going live sometime around 2 AM, and I'm both thrilled and terrified. I've got this thing, this poem, in my mind, that I'll be reciting on stage, in front of some of my good friends, that will make me rather vulnerable, and yet, I'm terribly proud of this piece. I poured my heart into it, and ultimately, it's very representative of me. But there's a line in the middle when I say "Tell me, when did it become a person's rite of passage/ to tell someone else that their rights had now vanished?" and it always strikes me when I'm reciting it.
In my poem, I reference this idea when I comment about people telling me that I either wasn't good enough or smart enough to do something, or that I wasn't choosing to live up to my full potential, and yet, at the same time, I was doing that to myself. I was sitting here and telling myself that I wasn't good enough, that I hadn't done enough, but... No!
In that sense, I was very, very wrong. No, I wasn't a prodigy, and I didn't cure cancer, or fight to end racial tension in an outspoken way, but did any of those things mean I hadn't tried my hardest and done my best? No.
What I realized was that in 18 years, I've done a heck of a lot.
Maybe, if you were to interview me about my life, you would say that it's been rather average, or boring, but in my eyes, what I've done in my life is unique to me and me alone. No award or college acceptance letter is ever going to change that, nor will it raise or lower my worth. As I said to my friend the other day, "I think you've reached true contentment when you can look at yourself and say 'life goals' and really mean it".
Obviously, we were engaged in a lighthearted conversation, but regardless, the statement stands. If any of us- you, me, my dad, your uncle, the boy who lives around the corner- if we tell ourselves that we need to look to other people for validation and for our own goals, we will never, ever, reach them. The only way we can achieve those goals is by dictating them ourselves, rather than letting others' lives dictate them for us.
For example, if I were to compare myself to Malala Yousafzai, I'm rather certain that our accolades wouldn't be balanced. But that's okay. I'm not meant to be her, nor is she meant to be me.
It was really reassuring to realize that, strangely enough. I've always prided myself on being an overachiever, a perfectionist, but once I got to high school, I realized that that wasn't always going to happen, and that's okay. To quote the illustrious pop star, Hannah Montana, "nobody's perfect" and "everybody makes mistakes"- making mistakes and learning from them, not getting everything that you worked hard for, not being as good as someone else at something- these are all invaluable parts of growing up, and as painful or unpleasant as they might be, they're so so necessary.
In other news- I've heard back from two of the 921384792837523849750923 million colleges that I applied to- and I've been accepted to BOTH! (This was pretty shocking to me, I had it set in my head that I wasn't going to be admitted anywhere for some reason). I'm very excited, in case you couldn't tell. Very very excited. Now I just have to wait the 900 years for the rest of my colleges to respond to my applications.
Well, that's about all I've got for now. I will include an audio version of my spoken word poem (read by me, of course) at the bottom, along with some pictures.
Hope you all had a wonderful month!
Signing off,
Amanda
If you're here, I'd suggest you go make yourself a bag of microwaveable popcorn now, because I'm going to be a while. Don't worry. I'll wait.
There. All settled? Lovely. Me too.
As the title of this post suggests, this is probably going to be a lot of me brain-dumping all sorts of awkward conversation with you, my currently inanimate but in all (hopeful) actuality living, breathing, and existing audience.
I recently celebrated my "Exodus from the Womb" as a friend of mine so delicately phrased it, which makes me a legal adult now.
I thought that turning 18 would be... well... spectacular.
But it wasn't.
Don't get me wrong, I was over the moon to have celebrated it the way I did, which brings me to the first topic regarding aging, that is, my birthday itself.
Any of you who know me well know that I get terrible migraines, oftentimes with no warning signs, that can be ridiculously hard to deal with, and can lead to nausea, stomach pain, and other unpleasant symptoms.
Any of you who know me well would also have noted that my body chose my birthday of November 20th to throw one at me.
Allow me to give you a short synopsis of my day (with some stream of consciousness effects that would put Conrad Jarrett to shame)
Curtain rises on Amanda, sleeping, in bed. Her hair is disheveled in a way that isn't quite "cute and messy" but rather, "a hairball". She is lazily draped over the sheets and covers of her bed, with one hand under her cheek while another hangs dormant over the side of her bed. She is wearing one sock with blue and brown stripes, its match is nowhere to be found.
5:30 AM: My first alarm goes off. I feel sick. Great way to start off the day, Amanda. Nice job getting a cold on your birthday.
7:00 AM: I leave my house ew it's cold to arrive at the school at
7:18 AM: for an NHS meeting that started at 7:15, to which I am late Whyareyouherewhyareyouherewhyareyouhereeeeeeee
7:30-8:00 AM: I repeatedly shove cough drops down my throat in a wild attempt to clear it before the afternoon. If I have like 27 of these, it'll have to help, right?
8:00 AM: I remember that I have callbacks for the show that night Well at least I'm dressed well. Nice going on that one.
8:01 AM: I remember that I left my slides for the callback at home. WOW. Way To Go.
8:02 AM: I promptly panic.
8:45 AM: I begin my AP English test, and almost immediately feel sick to my stomach. Again. WHYAMIHERE
9:33 AM: I finally make it to photography where I, again, feel sick to my stomach. I finally find myself some medicine in my backpack, and then remember that I don't know how to take medicine without food. They're right there. IF ONLY I KNEW HOW TO DRY SWALLOW.
10:22 AM: I make it to my 4th period class, where I promptly perform the first number with the group, and then spend the rest of the class lying down in the back. At this point, you may as well just go home. Who cares if it's your birthday, if you feel this bad, and you don't have any food to take the medicine...it's not worth it.
11:06 AM: My friend Amanda (who goes out with me every day during our fifth period open) tells me I can ride in the back of her car while she stops at her house and comes back to the school. She brings me part 1 of my birthday present (a blanket) and says the rest is for later (I was supposed to sleep over at her house that night) and also brings me applesauce to take the medicine with. Life is good. I take the medicine and my body is at ease for a while. Great! So you got through that much. Now all you have to do is make it through your audition filming, and your callbacks and then you get to see Mitchell and Amanda tonight and everything will be golden.
If any of you know me, you should know by now that absolutely NOTHING goes according to plan with me. It's an unfortunate side-effect that comes with the territory. I should mention, before I continue, however, that the other four periods of the day were delightful. We watched my favorite APUSH video during 6th period; I was able to sleep off the last effects of my migraine in my study hall, 7th period; in 8th period AP Music Theory we watched a video of an orchestra, and in Choir, 9th period, we sang my favorite piece at the end of the day. It was really just the very beginning and the preface to the end that were awful.
3:11 PM: Amanda is waiting outside the choir room to film her video auditions for college. She is becoming more and more stressed out the longer she waits, because a) she was not informed that the choir room would be occupied directly after school, and b) her friend Mitchell, who was supposed to assist her in filming the auditions, has bailed on her and she is now left to fix everything on her own.
I pace. A lot. And then, when I finally enter the choir room- my voice is fine. Wow! I guess all those cough drops did you good, huh? This is the best you've sounded in weeks, maybe months!
4:35 PM: After receiving many frantic texts from a friend of mine telling me to get into the drama room for callbacks, I finally enter, and end up staying until approximately
6:15 PM: After which I go to check my phone only to find out that Amanda, my friend, has cancelled on me as well. Leaving me all alone on my birthday. Well this'll be fun. I can see it now, 'Youth Becomes Adult in Silence: No Friends Care to Spend Time on Birthday'.... okay maybe that's a bit dramatic, but really, alone on my birthday? All I wanted was to relax with Amanda tonight...
6:30 PM: I arrive home after driving in a swirl of snow (at this point in time the highlight of my day) only to have my parents tell me that there's a present for me downstairs, but it's too heavy for them to carry. (Parentspeak for: "Please go get our stuff") I distract them by talking about how awful my day was. Please. Everyone else cancelled on me, just let me vent about my day and then go sleep. PLEEEEEEAAAAAAASE.
6:35 PM: They tell me to go downstairs and get my present, so I walk downstairs. UGH such a hassle. (full confession, I'm probably the laziest person I know)
6:36 PM: SURPRISE. OHMYGOSHYOUDIDNT. BUT YOU DID. HOW. HOW DID YOU DO THIS? YOU GOT JOHNPAUL HERE? WHAT? AND JONNY? (For those of you who aren't in the loop, these are two friends of mine who live, respectively, 60 and 15 minutes away, and who I most certainly was NOT expecting to see in my basement)
From that moment on, the evening was lovely. The friends who had "bailed" on me were all (not shockingly) in my basement, and they all ended up throwing me the first successful surprise party that I've ever had (and ALWAYS wanted). That much was lovely.
But in turning 18, there was a lot more on my mind than just how to celebrate. I've been slowly realizing that each day that I have on Earth is pretty much wasted if I don't at least do something productive. In fact, I drove a friend of mine home earlier that week and we had talked about my "high school bucket list" and I confessed that it had started with ten things and I was now down to just one. "Wow, you've really been busy" he commented, a statement that I willingly agreed with in the moment, and yet, upon further consideration, felt wasn't accurate at all.
Yes, I had accomplished many of the things on my list.
I had broken a friendship and then rebuilt it (1).
I had performed my own music (2).
I had gotten a 5 on an AP test (3).
I had won the talent show (4).
I had had my art featured in the school (5).
I had found a poetry slam/club and joined it (6).
I had written a rap song (7).
I had tried something new and random every year (8).
I had performed my own poetry (9).
The only thing left was to write a book. Strange, right? If I had ever had the time, patience, or dedication for NaNoWriMo, it would've been amazing, but... I never did, and so that remains.
And yet, as my friend and I were talking, I began to think about how trivial all of these things were. For someone who was notorious for dreaming big, why were my high school goals so small?
And this is where the train of thought gets dangerous. As I began to ponder the real significance of my life thus far, I began to conclude that it was rather pointless, because, well, I really haven't done much in my eyes.
I've participated in things, and I've talked to people, but I kept on feeling that the more I thought about my "accomplishments" the more paltry they seemed. I mentioned earlier on that I wanted to perform my own poetry, yes? Well, my opportunity to do that is actually going to be happening in about 6 hours, seeing as this post will be going live sometime around 2 AM, and I'm both thrilled and terrified. I've got this thing, this poem, in my mind, that I'll be reciting on stage, in front of some of my good friends, that will make me rather vulnerable, and yet, I'm terribly proud of this piece. I poured my heart into it, and ultimately, it's very representative of me. But there's a line in the middle when I say "Tell me, when did it become a person's rite of passage/ to tell someone else that their rights had now vanished?" and it always strikes me when I'm reciting it.
In my poem, I reference this idea when I comment about people telling me that I either wasn't good enough or smart enough to do something, or that I wasn't choosing to live up to my full potential, and yet, at the same time, I was doing that to myself. I was sitting here and telling myself that I wasn't good enough, that I hadn't done enough, but... No!
In that sense, I was very, very wrong. No, I wasn't a prodigy, and I didn't cure cancer, or fight to end racial tension in an outspoken way, but did any of those things mean I hadn't tried my hardest and done my best? No.
What I realized was that in 18 years, I've done a heck of a lot.
Maybe, if you were to interview me about my life, you would say that it's been rather average, or boring, but in my eyes, what I've done in my life is unique to me and me alone. No award or college acceptance letter is ever going to change that, nor will it raise or lower my worth. As I said to my friend the other day, "I think you've reached true contentment when you can look at yourself and say 'life goals' and really mean it".
Obviously, we were engaged in a lighthearted conversation, but regardless, the statement stands. If any of us- you, me, my dad, your uncle, the boy who lives around the corner- if we tell ourselves that we need to look to other people for validation and for our own goals, we will never, ever, reach them. The only way we can achieve those goals is by dictating them ourselves, rather than letting others' lives dictate them for us.
For example, if I were to compare myself to Malala Yousafzai, I'm rather certain that our accolades wouldn't be balanced. But that's okay. I'm not meant to be her, nor is she meant to be me.
It was really reassuring to realize that, strangely enough. I've always prided myself on being an overachiever, a perfectionist, but once I got to high school, I realized that that wasn't always going to happen, and that's okay. To quote the illustrious pop star, Hannah Montana, "nobody's perfect" and "everybody makes mistakes"- making mistakes and learning from them, not getting everything that you worked hard for, not being as good as someone else at something- these are all invaluable parts of growing up, and as painful or unpleasant as they might be, they're so so necessary.
In other news- I've heard back from two of the 921384792837523849750923 million colleges that I applied to- and I've been accepted to BOTH! (This was pretty shocking to me, I had it set in my head that I wasn't going to be admitted anywhere for some reason). I'm very excited, in case you couldn't tell. Very very excited. Now I just have to wait the 900 years for the rest of my colleges to respond to my applications.
Well, that's about all I've got for now. I will include an audio version of my spoken word poem (read by me, of course) at the bottom, along with some pictures.
(I had some fun on Guy Fawkes Day)
Bostonian Pigeons (Why not, you know?)
I believe my exact quote was "Do I smile? I want to smile, because this is super cool, but at the same time... people died.... Alright, smile it is!" (Me at the site of the Boston Massacre)
Spiral staircases because they're fantastic.
Hope you all had a wonderful month!
Signing off,
Amanda
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteYour blog is my favorite thing.
ReplyDeleteWhy thank you :)
ReplyDelete