The Not So Secret Life of an American Teenager: 2190 Days
I wrote this entry at the end of my freshman year of high school, with so little life experienced and so much left to learn. Given the sentimental person I’ve always been and my drastic fear of change, becoming an adult was something that always terrified me. Because of this completely rational fear, I made the choice to start being the type of person that says “yes” to new experiences and never turns down an adventure. While I’ve definitely had my monotonous days since then, the quickly deteriorating number of days I have left in my childhood remained in the back of my mind pushing me to make the most of the time I have left.
Although I’m technically an adult now and about to move out and start a more grown up life, I still think this entry resonates and hope it can help someone else put their fleeting childhood into perspective.
The Not So Secret Life of an American Teenager: 2190 Days
“You are only a teenager for 2190 days.” Sometimes it feels like those days are slipping through your fingers like sand in an hourglass while other times there’s nothing you’d rather do than push a magic button and skip them all in a single second. Most of those days will be filled with monotonous occurences of school and boring tasks. Many will be spent surrounded by people you love and having fun. Some will be spent sad and lonely over heartbreak, loss, being left out and just figuring out who you really are. In the midst of all of these cheerful, miserable, mundane, and peaceful days lies the few that really matter. The type of nights you remember forever as the “good old days” and reminisce about to your future children are the days that we all look forward to our whole childhood.
These are the types of days and nights that remind you of why you always wanted to be one of the big kids and trade your days on the playground for nights going crazy. The type of days you spend falling in love with life and exploring with your closest friends or the night laughing so hard you leave with a stomach ache, new experiences of living on the edge and trying new things or finding a shocking new comfort in something that was previously so ordinary that it simply went unnoticed. Those are the days that make you wish you could stop the hourglass of the rest of our childhood.
Each magnificent grain of sand slips by at the end of every night as your head hits the pillow and you lay awake replaying everything that you experienced over the past twenty four hours. Those are the pieces of sand that seem to glimmer in the sun with the beauty of a first love or a new adventure. Other days the only possibility in sight in the big red fast forward button staring you down with the dread of continuing on. Those are the days where you feel broken. You feel stuck, like a car racing in circles in a rush to get somewhere but unable to find the right path. On those types of days tears flood your vision until eventually you become too numb to continue crying.
You seem to be running full speed ahead into a brick wall with no way to stop and for a second, the impact of the crash doesn’t seem as bad as the turmoil it took to get there because at least it’s finally coming to an end. The reality of it all is that your teenage years aren’t some hourglass that you can simply flip over and start again before time runs out. There is no big red button to skip through the commotion of growing up. There are infinite possibilities to learn and grow. But none of them can occur when you focus on reliving the past or jumping ahead to the future rather than remaining in the present. There are only 2190 days that you get to be a teenager, so get up and stop wasting them… Avery Blue
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