I learned a lot of things in 2012, mainly that I'm really not as smart as I think I am. One of the little anecdotes people get me on is that I really do think that I am an old soul trapped in a young body, manipulated by the idiocy of my generation, blah, blah, blah. I'm really not all that.
One of my childhood friends graduated from high school last year and has always struggled with school. She barely scraped by with C's, and she is kicked out by her parents every other week because of one thing or another. She comes over to my house because she apparently has nowhere else to go, and anyway, it's a lot of drama. She came bawling to my doorstep last night that she had failed college and that her parents were really for reals kicking her out. And I was scared. That's coming up in less than a year. What if my parents did that? When we went to pick up her luggage so that she would have clothes to sleep in, her mother pulled me aside, and smiling cheekily, told me that they needed to be firm, and they were not abandoning her. Her life just needed to begin, and thank you for helping her.
I freaked out. I was genuinely concerned for my friend, yet couldn't she see that her parents were only helping her?
And then I freaked out some more. Am I doing this to my parents, and myself?!
Yep. I realized that all of this stress for the past few months has been for nothing. Yes, getting the rest of my life is going to be really difficult and I'm going to be stumbling around in the dark while everyone else is wearing night-vision goggles. Because everyone else did it, and I'm going to grow up and get experience that will be my own night-vision goggles, and everything will make sense looking back. So I have to keep moving forward, and keep swimming like a shark so I don't go belly-up.
That is one of the biggest lessons I've learned recently.
Besides that, I really, really love books. Yeah.
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