“One day, my dad called me down. I was like, ‘Why? What’s going on?’ For the next 90 minutes, he either lectured or yelled at me for what I was doing wrong. ‘How could you not put in the work for something? You have this whole, huge opportunity for the internship. You aren’t practicing your instruments. You just do the bare minimum. You never really try. You’re just going through life. You are just half-a**ing everything. You can’t do stuff right.’ And he said something I still remember to this day. He said, ‘You can either be a really, REALLY hard worker, or, you could be a slacker that does nothing. NOTHING. You CAN’T be both.’ For the next 30 minutes, I sat down, wondering what was going on. What did I do wrong? What should I do? And now, it just feels like ever since ‘The Day,’ I fell into that cycle of, I need these people to help me. I can't trust myself, and I can’t do the work myself, because I’m so used to having someone help me. I’ve always been a child, and you go into being an adult so soon. You have high school. You have college. I have these decisions I have to make now. Right NOW. But I can’t. Because I’m so stuck in the past that I can’t look through, into the future. I’m so scared of my past mistakes. I don’t know how to move on. I’m seriously scared that my past has affected my future. Ever since that day, I realized that you gotta live EVERY DAY like it's the LAST DAY of your LIFE. Like there is no tomorrow. Like you have no time left. The thing is, if you don’t live life like every day is the last day of your life, you’re gonna be living life like you still have time left. You’re whole life. Until the end. And you’re never going to have that sense of satisfaction. You know, there are 86,400 seconds in a day. Think of that as a second is a dollar. Would you waste all of that money on one thing? No. You would spend it wisely and make sure it's well spent. So, you gotta do the same with your day.” (Parsippany, NJ)