Graduation & Sailing Away

I'm graduating in December. As of December 14, 2013, I will be the proud owner of a Bachelor's degree, a 3.0 (hopefully higher) GPA and no student loans. (Thankfully, my parents financially helped me through school when my scholarships weren't enough.) This is easily the scariest realization of my entire life. After all, this will be the first time in 17 years that I didn't have some form of school taking place.

But there's also a strange sense of escape, of freedom. I'm not sure why, but I have this desire to get out. I need to go away, go live somewhere else where no one knows my name. I need to cut the ties that I have holding me together and be free. Living with my parents for 21 years (22 in July, happy birthday me!) means that I've always been who they want me to be. I was the golden child, the one who came home before curfew and rarely caused trouble outside of the house. Other than one or two times, I honestly don't remember getting into too much trouble with my parents growing up.

But now, that's all about to change. Not that I'm going to start being a trouble maker, but that I'm the adult now. Once I graduate and move away, my life as "the daughter" will take a back seat to my life as "the adult." I'll decide how often we do the dishes in my apartment, what I'm having for dinner every night, and when laundry gets done. It's frightening, but I'm genuinely excited. I'm in desperate need of this, to be honest. I can't be a child forever. As horrible as it is to admit, my parents won't be around for the rest of my life. So now's the time to discover who I am outside of "The Child." Ready or not, here I come.

A constant uphill battle

It's hard to look past the girl you see when you look at me. I'm loud, sassy, and seemingly confident. I'm in a sorority, I'm not exactly thin, and I'm convinced I was supposed to be born British. What you won't get by looking at me is that I'm far from what you'd think. Everyone is like an onion, and after the first few layers of toughness, you'll find a girl who takes everything to heart, no matter where it's coming from.

It's going on a year and a half now that I've been taking antidepressants. I've been seeing a therapist for a few months, something I wish I'd started sooner. Depression, anxiety, and self-doubt: these are hauntingly familiar things I struggle with on a daily basis. So while you see a girl sitting in your class who seems loud and obnoxious, I see the girl who struggles to find a reason to smile every single day.

I'm doing better, but there have been some really dark times. With the help of my doctor and my therapist, I have a shot at living a somewhat normal life, or as normal as I can be. I'm not saying that it's an easy fix, because it's really not. You don't wake up one morning and realize that it's all better. Antidepressants aren't a band-aid, they're a coping aid. One thing that's really started to help me is looking towards the future rather than the past, an idea that is reinforced by my love for traveling. I could sit around and look at all the places I've been and think, "Wow, what a great journey," but that seems like accepting it's over, which it's not.

I don't want to look back on my life and think I wasted a single minute doing something other than embracing life. Years from now, when the memories are being passed around at Christmas dinner, I want to be the one who has the best ones. I've been given one life, and only one life, so I'm determined to make the most of it. I'll be damned if some chemical unbalance in my brain is going to steal any of it from me.

To Grandmother's House We Go...

The house my dad grew up in has stories covering every inch of it. The bedroom at the top of the stairs is where my dad started a fire when he was 4. The cops used to park in the driveway when they were coming inside to tattle on the childish antics of my aunts and uncles. The kitchen table was for card games or eating, but never at the same time.

There's a thousand and one memories tucked away in the corners of this place, and every trip uncovers a new one. I'm the second child of a man who comes from a family of twelve kids, meaning cousins were in no shortage growing up. I was scattered somewhere in the middle, far from the first to do much of anything. It's like Middle Child Syndrome on an entirely new level, really. I desperately wanted my family to acknowledge me when in reality, I was one of 50+ kids running around at reunions.

My grandma's doing this thing where she's going through all of her photographs and sorting them by the kids included, and tonight, she handed me a photograph I didn't even know existed. I have one, maybe two pictures with my grandfather who died when I was six. The man was terrifying, and my only real memory of him is hugging him goodbye as he laid in bed hooked up to an oxygen machine. Right before we went in his bedroom, my dad told me it would probably be the last time I ever saw the man. Needless to say, six years old is a pretty early age to understand death, but I knew that the tears I was crying were in order.

Tonight, my grandfather appeared in various photographs I flipped through. I saw him with his arm around my grandma's waist, him in his military uniform, and for the first time, him holding a five month old version of myself. He's not scolding me, he's looking at me like I'm something special. I'd be lying if I said I didn't cry, because I most certainly did. I guess at six years old, I didn't realize how much he loved me, but now I definitely do.

Time is a relative concept.

There's no possible way to survive the spring forward time change unscathed. It doesn't matter if you manage to get ten hours of sleep when it occurs, which I did. Losing an hour of your life is surprisingly hard to handle.

Which is kind of funny when you think about time in general, right? I mean, we sit around spending hours doing pointless things. Sometimes, we'll spend an hour at Starbucks with our friend catching up over coffee. We'll give an hour to a preacher or other religious official, whether we listen to the sermon or not. There's always an hour to drop on Pinterest or Tumblr or Facebook. But when it comes time to buckle down and study, I've somehow run out of hours to spend.

I've heard it said that "time flies when you're having fun," but I think it's really a lot more simple than that. When we don't look at a clock, or don't pay attention to time, it ceases to matter. Just like when we sleep, we lose all sense of how long we're asleep for. Time is a concept that humans created, and when humans forget about it, time loses it's power.

We've got clocks everywhere: on our phones, on our wrists, on the wall of nearly every room we enter. I know plenty of people who claim that "it's annoying" when a room doesn't have a clock, even if they've got one or two in their possession. We're obsessed with this thing we've created, teaching our children from young ages that it's important to understand it, when ultimately, there's about a thousand other things that matter more.

Once you learn how to tell time, you fall victim to it, letting it encompass your life forever. You're late, you're early, you're right on time. You can't have coffee with your friends between work and class because it takes you too long to walk from Point A to Point B. Sometimes, I wonder what our world would be like if we had never established time as a whole. The sun would still rise in the east, wouldn't it? I guess it's just impossible for the world to run smoothly without some kind of concept to control us, to keep us all moving together, just like clockwork.

The Last Round: Spring Break 2013

I haven't spent a Spring Break in Oklahoma since I was a sophomore in high school. Actually, I vaguely want to say I didn't even stay here then, but it's almost tucked too far back in my memory to remember. Let's just say that Spring Break is my thing.

2008 was a free trip to New York City where my yearbook advisor was invited to speak at a journalism conference at Columbia University. In 2009, he took us out to see the plant where our yearbook was made in Fresno, California, but after that one day of school-related business, we traveled up the coast to Coos Bay, Oregon. After graduating from high school, my position as editor no longer mattered, which meant I was on my own for planning (and financing) these trips, or so I thought.

My freshman year of college, I joined the Women's Rowing team. Spring Break was a week-long training in Cocoa Beach, Florida. We spent four hours a day in the boat, so after we all came back and got some showers in, the evenings were spent on the beach, at local eateries, or maybe even just sleeping. It was a rough week physically, because I ended up suffering an injury that meant I got to spend a little extra time with our trainer and each day meant I may or may not have lost my spot in the boat. We competed at the end of the week and I was proudly representing the freshman team in our A boat at the 6 seat. (I was a port, for anyone who knows a thing about rowing.)

Sophomore year, after quitting the rowing team and gaining a bit of a reality check in the form of financially supporting myself, I chose a little bit of a quieter Spring Break. My friend and I spent a week living in my cousin's apartment in Chicago. I felt pretty independent and cool, despite the fact that his office was only a few blocks away and I saw him nearly every single day. I spent my nights lounging next to his full-length windows as the sun set over the city and my days having lunch at some of the nicest restaurants in the business district. It was my second trip to the Windy City, what became the second of seven that year, and the first time I stayed more than one day. It was then that I knew, I could live in Chicago someday.

Last year, as a junior in college, I  traveled to the wonderful land of Arizona. We've done the Grand Canyon thing before, but this time, I was tagging along with my parents, my brother, and my grandparents on my mother's side. Also, there was a lot more action before and after the big hole in the ground: Spring Training. I'm a baseball fan, so getting to watch my Chicago Cubs take on my dad's White Sox was the highlight of the trip. (The free tickets to Colorado Rockies games from my dad's cousin, the manager, was a pretty great bonus, too.)

I'm graduating in December, which means this is it, folks. Maybe someday, I'll have kids who get holidays, but this won't ever be the same. So now, how do I rival all these wonderful trips I've taken in my last chance at an official Spring Break? The answer is simple: I'm going home. Not home to the city I've lived in for 21 years, but home to the city I fell in love with from Day 1: Chicago. Technically, I'm going to spend the week at my Grandma's in Illinois, but there's a couple days that are already book for Chicago. I'll be there for St. Patrick's Day, and being 21 for the first time means I'll actually be able to enjoy the holiday properly. So let's raise our glasses in a toast to The Last Round.