to feeling oh so old and so very very very young. I felt OLD, jaded with experience, independent and hardworking. I was looking at colleges and traveling alone, I felt like I could do anything at all if I really wanted to. But I’d look at myself in the mirror and see a child, with chipmunk cheeks and wide eyes. I couldn’t drive yet, I didn’t drink, or smoke, or engage in any sort of teenage rebellion. I was simultaneously out of time and just beginning.
I didn’t make cross country, or the either of the plays. I didn’t keep hold of the friends I wanted to, and I found myself alone more often than not. I felt angry and sad and happy (sometimes all at once!) My grades were pretty good, but they would never be as good as my sister’s. Sometimes I wanted to kill myself, or at the very least run away and never come back. I loved myself and I hated myself. I heard things I wasn’t supposed to, I listened to sob stories that I didn’t want to hear. Somedays I laughed and I sang but a lot of days I cried and I couldn’t get out of bed.
But even when I lost, I tried to gain something. I did learn to run, I did learn the feeling of a racing shell flying under me as I rowed. I felt the tired joy at the end of a long day of work. I did learn to love myself better, to let myself be angry and sad and happy (sometimes all at once!) I spent spring days with flowers in my hair, hoping for better days, I spent summer afternoons with the sun in my hair surrounded by people I loved, I spent fall mornings with my head buried in books with an exhausted ambition, and I spent winter nights trading secrets and stories in the backseat of a car.
To be kissed, to trying to explain what it was like to spend sixteen years on this planet and not be kissed. (Here’s to finally being kissed.) To be wanted, to have someone look at you and only you, to be someone’s favorite thing in the world, To be satisfied, to be content and proud of my place in the world, to feel at peace with myself and my life, to stop waging this never-ending war inside my head.
being sixteen, being stupid and brilliant, sad and happy, angry and calm, to hating and loving, forgetting and learning, to being a walking contradiction. Here’s to being better when I’m seventeen.