I'm Tired

So, I recently attended my very first college fair. And I'm not entirely sure how I feel about the whole ordeal. In some ways, I feel like I've been at the high school forever and should be graduating this year instead of the next. And on the other hand, it feels impossible for me to be a junior. I've just now discovered how stressful it is to figure out what I want to do with the rest of my life. I mean, it's only the rest of my life, right? Shouldn't be THAT bad....Yeah. Okay. Contrary to popular belief, that decision is quite daunting. Intimidating, at the very least.

I mean, I think I know what I want to do when I "grow up." I want to be a high school English teacher. Ideally, I'd just be a novelist and spend every waking moment writing. But as I've been told countless times, we do not live in an ideal world, or even a very good world.

But this college fair just really brought home the reality of my life: I have this year and my senior year and then I'm gone. I'll move away and go to college and figure out how I'm going to make money and get by in life. That leaves me very little time to be a kid, what with the planning, the studying, the figuring it all out. It seems as if every moment of my day, I've got a million different thoughts dancing around inside my head, all of which I have to consider before discarding them and moving onto the next demanding thought. Study for the anatomy test. Make brownies for culinary arts. Write that parody for creative writing. Think about who to interview for the next feature story for the paper. And above all maintain a relationship with God.

I'm not complaining. I'm blessed beyond compare, and I know that all of this is just a natural part of growing up. But I feel as if I speak for almost everyone my age. I bet nobody can guess the single sentence I hear pass through more lips in a day than any other. "I'm tired." That's all we teenagers know how to be anymore. Tired. It seems as if a dozen different people or tasks are vying for our attention at any given time, and we're being torn in just as many directions to decide which task should be accomplished first.

And when added to the stress of planning our entire futures, that's a heavy burden to bear on our teenage shoulders. Not unbearable, but heavy nonetheless.

And if that weren't enough pressure in the first place, there's the fact of the matter that my generation is going to inherit a world riddled with problems and chaos and promised consequences of actions we had nothing to do with. It's going to be the futures we're planning for today that the present leaders' actions and mistakes will affect. And because of that, we may not have much of a future to plan for. But we'll be expected to turn it all around anyway, and when we fail to do so, what then? How does an entire generation go about finding forgiveness for the sins of our fathers, metaphorically speaking?

My sophomore English teacher told us last year that the adults of the present have messed the world up beyond their help, but that my generation will have to do something about if we ever want to live in a world of peace again. But how will we ever do this when all we can think about today is how tired we are, and how we just wish all of our responsibilities would vanish? Is there a solution, and will an individual, a great visionary, an inspirational group, rise up out of my generation born of the technological era to find it?