I’ve never cried as hard as I did at my middle school graduation.
I f*cking RAN middle school. How could life get any better? I knew it would all be downhill from there. It had to be, right?
But then I got to high school. My ascent was a slow climb, but by the time I hit my senior year, I was feeling the same love for life that I’d had at my eighth-grade graduation.
LIFE F*CKING ROCKED. And the thought of graduating and going off to college legitimately made me physically ill.
Giving up my parents’ care and spending every day with my best friends, who had been there for me through thick and thin? NO THANK YOU. There was no way life would ever get any better than this.
That is, until I got to college.
And you know what F*CKNG ROCKS even more than high school? College. College f*cking rocks.
You make the best friends ever, and then you LIVE WITH THEM. You can party any night of the week and suddenly have an endless supply of boys who’ve never seen you with braces or a mullet.
I wondered how something so wonderful could even be real. I must have bruised my arms so badly in college from constantly pinching myself to make sure I wasn’t dreaming.
Obviously, leaving college was not easy for someone who loved it as much as I did. I dreaded graduation like most people dread death or childbirth or the passage of their first kidney stone. Life was absolutely FANTASTIC. Why would I want anything to change?!?! I wasn’t insane… or was I?
Like all things, however, graduation eventually came around. I cried and threw up a few times out of fear for my future. I was that upset and petrified about what could be in store.
But life kept moving forward. And you know what? IT GOT BETTER. AGAIN.
These days, instead of taking classes I’m not interested in, I get to go to work and do something I actually LIKE. I get to live with my best friends in an apartment that is actually OURS. And we do adult things — like sipping on nice beer — instead of shotgunning Keystones on the front porch.
The only difference now is that I’m not afraid of the next step. I used to think, If this is SO great, how could anything get better?
But if you have the right attitude, life really does have a way of constantly getting better, even when you think that is literally impossible.
Your attitude is what’s most important.
When I look back on high school, I realize it honestly kind of sucked. I mean, I guess “sucked” is a little harsh, but it definitely was by no means a PEAK in my life. I had family problems, a mullet, braces and headgear.
But that’s not what I focused on. I focused on all of the things I DID have.
Sure, my family life wasn’t perfect at the time, but I still had people who loved me and supported me, and that was more than most people could say. Yeah, I had braces, a mullet and headgear, but I still had friends who were brave enough to be seen with me anyway.
I didn’t let anything stop me from genuinely convincing myself that this was the time of my life.
If you force yourself to idealize every chapter of your life and consider it your peak, your outlook will change. Your vision will narrow, and you’ll only be able to see the great things that make this particular time your peak. Everything else is a minor annoyance.
Your fear of the next step is actually a good thing.
I’ve also learned that fear of the next step isn’t such a bad thing. It’s simply proof that you loved something SO MUCH that you’re afraid of losing it.
It’s proof that you’re terrified of letting go of something that you recognize has been so great.
I was LUCKY to have lived through things that I feared would end. And if you ever feel this fear like I did, you should remember that, too. Because there is no fear when you don’t have anything special to lose.
Your life is way too short to feel like you’re doing anything besides peaking.
The bottom line here is that any moment could be your last, so why not also make it your best? Life is so f*cking short, and there is no time or need to treat any waking moment as anything short of the best moment of your life.
