You feel like you’re going to drown. Like the waves of adulthood and growth are looming over you, waiting for the right moment to sink you into an ocean of chaos and uncertainty. They wait patiently while your swim, while you lie on your back staring at the clouds above you. When they crash down, engulfing your body and seizing your every waking thought, there is no better word to describe it than drowning. You’re flailing around helplessly in an ocean of growth, friends, relationships, regrets, failures, and hopelessness. You can’t keep up with a world changing every half second. With either a thousand different relationships scrambling your mind, or none, both embedding a sense of helplessness. There is rarely a moment where helplessness doesn’t prevail, a moment where it doesn’t emerge in the form of a gigantic wave ready to swallow you whole. 

It pushes and tugs you in the direction of the thread fate spins, slamming your body on rocks as it does. The salty water pours into your wounds as your head keeps falling under the waves of fear and uncertainty, the journey ahead staying permanently etched into your mind as a terrifying mystery. One that not even the greatest minds to ever walk on this Earth could solve. Your body is tugged like that of a doll against the currents of arguments, fights, questions, and dread. Growing up, relationships with your friends and parents, with that someone who you are hoping to be more than friends with, it’s suffocating. All you want is a moment of peace. A moment where you don’t have to think about getting older. About school, college, the future. A moment that gives you comfort and solace. 

Eventually, you reach the shore. It could be in weeks, or it could be in years, but you reach. When you do, you grip the sands of acceptance between your fingers, you feel them to be wet from your journey through the ocean of uncertainty. You watching them slip out of your grasp and join the sands beneath your body. Looking behind you, you see people your age, already far from just acceptance. Already in college, already doing something with their life, already working or achieving their dreams. And you have barely scraped the surface; but you don’t fret. You don’t worry, instead, you look at the ocean you survived. You look back at all the hardships, the friendships lost, the failures, the losses, the tears. At everything people don’t tell you would happen as a teenager. You look at the wounds you did not anticipate to have, and you smile. You may have been battered by the waves, by the rocks and the currents, but they were merely bumps in your journey to the shore. Now that you’re here, you can live. You can reduce the hopelessness, fear, and uncertainty that plagued you, and you can live. After all, what more is there to life but living?