The Summer Ends

I initially drafted this the weekend before school started. I suppose time got the best of me because I blinked and now I’ve been in school for two weeks. Part of this entry was drafted near the end of the summer, some of it now. I think it accurately represents how I feel about the transition between a hazy summer and bustling school year. Sometimes it feels just like summer again, sometimes it feels like I’ve just always been in school. It’s jarring and fragmented, but in its entirety it’s a process that I go along with.

In the United States, each high school grade level is often replaced with a word. Ninth grade is freshman year, tenth grade is sophomore year, eleventh grade is junior year, and twelfth grade is senior year. For most of my life, the transition between grades was seamless, to simply replace one number with its successor. However, to entirely replace one word with another is something else. It’s a completely new meaning, even if each grade is only a year apart. Originally this new label was something I could not comprehend, but after a few weeks it’s an identity I’ve accepted.

It’s crazy to think I’m becoming what I formerly could only dream of being.

It’s fascinating, this change. To go from summer days that stretch far out into time, to what’s essentially my “normal life” as a student. It’s strange to think how fast everything seems. I look back a year ago and I see a girl who was afraid of what was to come. Scared of a new school, new people, new beginnings. She probably wouldn’t have predicted where she’d end up now. If I could go back in time I’d tell her she was entirely capable of getting through it all, that she was doing the best she could and that was enough.

I would say I feel a lot more in my own skin this year. It’s like over the summer I found things to latch onto and build an identity on, to try and shape into my own worldviews. Something to make this life feel like my own, if that makes any sense. That I am a real person with real experiences that can’t be overlooked.

I think most children fear the dark not because of the physical absence of light, but because it presents the unknown. Ordinary objects are left to be exaggerated by imagination, we conjure ideas of what could be hiding there. In a similar way, I fear the future. I don’t know what field or career I’ll pursue, where I’ll live, or how I really want to go about the rest of my life beyond college. It’s almost terrifying to not have a plan when everyone else your age seems to already know where they’ll be twenty years from now. My plan is a blank slate.

I’m currently reading The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. There’s an excerpt from it that sort of resonated with me and is somewhat related to this.

"I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet."

I fear that I am not able to enjoy my life to its fullest. This world presents me with the abundance of everything; every experience is mine for the taking if I choose so.Theoretically, I could be anything if I had the heart to do so. But I don’t. I’m passionless. I’m not satisfied with settling for a mediocre life either. In this paralysis, I lose the time I could have to be something, so I’m nothing instead.

Maybe some of this resonates with you, maybe it doesn’t. At the end of the day, I’m just a girl on the Internet.