Growing Pains and Practice Rounds

This was probably my favorite Christmas and New Years to date, it was just so good to be home and see family and go through the familiar rituals of the holidays.  It's always nice to be home but when you've had a roller coaster year there's something very comforting about Christmas and something very reassuring about ringing in a brand New Year.  The only remotely jarring part of this Holiday Season was the sudden realization that if I got the okay to go abroad for a full year, I wouldn't be home the next Christmas.  After a few minutes I was okay with not being home for Christmas 2012 because I'd be home for the next one!  But then I realized that the next one would be the Christmas of my senior year and the one after that I would have a job, be living who knows where, and have little to no break to come home and see my family because I would be an actual adult.  Then the tears started.

I wish someone could've video taped me sobbing about growing up and sent back in time to my nine-to-eighteen-year-old selves and said, "Look, look at this sobbing, wretched little creature!  This is what you're going to look like when you realize you only have two years of any kind of childhood left so CHILL OUT and stop wishing your youth away."  Even with that proof in front of them, I doubt my nine-to-eighteen-year-old selves, who always tried so hard to make themselves seem older, would have believed that the moment they truly realized how close they were to being a grown up would be filled with tears rather than gleeful jumping and shouting and clapping of hands.

Thankfully, two years is still a lot of time and I've got a lot to keep me busy during it, like going abroad.  Yes, it means one less Christmas with my family, but going abroad will be really good practice for being an adult.  I'll still have that nice little cushion of childhood around me but I'll have to make my own decisions about what I do and how I respond to things and I'll be held absolutely accountable for those actions by myself and others.  And then I'll come home and be safe in my Kenyon Bubble for one more year and then I'll graduate, get a job, and move out of the house.

And then I'll be an adult?  Sort of.  Graduating from college, turning twenty-two, and getting a job won't magically flip a switch that will make me act and think more maturely, instead, the experiences that accompany those actions will gradually shape me into an adult.  That's where having gone abroad will come in handy, it'll be like having a practice round.  If I've already got experience being independent, having to make my own choices, and holding myself accountable, then when it comes time to apply that in the real world, making tough choices and responding to tricky situations appropriately will come a little easier.  I think...