There are quite a few nights where I am lying in my bed, freezing, partially under the covers, unable to shut my mind off long enough to find some sleep. I'm high off exhaustion, and my mind is flipping around different thoughts and events from throughout the day. My mind spills into thought processes where nothing makes sense. Everything seems to melt away into the space inside my mind, and my body feels like it is floating and twisting, but I have not moved a muscle.
I close my eyes and feel like I own the world. I think about what I believe, what is in the past, what will be the future, my friends and family—basically, everything. I think about what I want to do, how I want to get there, and where I want to end up. I wonder about my life, and if it influences anybody else’s life. I wonder about the consequences of following either a dream or a statistic. I want to go everywhere to practice religions and cultures and learn something about mankind or myself that expands my reality. I want to know what it would be like to starve, to be rich, to be a different ethnicity, or even to understand politics because, let’s face it, nobody does.
I also want responsibility, and to know when enough is enough. I want to make mistakes that will teach me but not destroy me. I want to know if children and grandchildren are in my future, and how or if a career will fit into that picture. I want to know if I will be merely content with my life or proud and joyful. I want to know if I will know as much as my grandmother, who practically has a sixth sense about premeditated mistakes.
I see the world as paint flying in space. It is floating around me, and none of it makes sense. Then, it mixes into these colors that make me want to project the color of happiness, adventure, mischievousness, pain and curiosity.
The world is like my thought processes. None of it makes sense. The one thing I know for sure is that when I go to college, I want to live every color I am able to. I want to experience the passion of red. I look forward to being passionate about a topic I can gain an infinite amount of knowledge of and interests me. I want to struggle, and fail, and overall succeed in a way I can’t even imagine. I want to get lost in orange, which is creativity and imagination connected to individuality and personal opinion. In these areas, I excel, because I can see the world differently.
I want to envelope myself in a world of brown and green, so that I can grow personally and educationally, while finding roots. These roots will help me build a base for my future. I want to absorb yellow and blue to harness the mental focus that comes with them. They symbolize clarity and mental awareness. I need to focus on my work as well as my responsibilities. I will gain the knowledge to see life, not as how I want to see it, but how it needs to be seen. I want to dive head first into indigo. It is deep and personal. It is intuition, and trying something new and different, whether you are terrified or completely prepared.
I think am ready for this new leap in life. I have struggled, put others first, put myself first, lied, told the truth, snuck out, been to different countries, fought with my parents, lost a father, gained another, had my world crumble, and had help building it back up. I know who I am: a teenage girl dreaming of learning everything I can and working in the catacombs of France or the pyramids of Central and South America. And I am going to get there.