What if I don’t make it? That seems to be The QuestionTM right now. Obviously, I can’t speak for everyone, but I am pretty sure I’m not the only teenager constantly thinking about the possibility of this. We’re all still “young and dumb”, as one would say or, as we so fittingly say in Luxemburgish: “nach gréng hannert den Oueren”, so how are we supposed to make all these big, life changing decisions that are waiting right around the corner? Although “waiting right around the corner” seems a little too harmless. “The big, life changing decisions we’re gonna have to make are heading in our direction like a brick wall, and it’s going to squish us like sandwiches at any moment” seems more appropriate in this case. We do expect the impact (I did mention that it is coming right at us, right?), but we somehow manage to feel terribly unprepared anyway.
Almost (or actually) suffering a mental breakdown any time you talk or even think about the near and farther future is probably normal in the case of us teenagers (or at least I hope so), but couldn’t this be avoided? In my honest opinion: I don’t think so. All the adults trying to make it seem as though they succeeded in everything and never struggled whatsoever? Guess what. They’re pretending. I genuinely can’t imagine even a single person has ever succeeded in everything they’ve wanted to do and, as you might have heard or read somewhere before, that may even be for the best. I really can’t imagine something could be done in the education system to alleviate the anxiety young people have to endure, because no matter what they’d do, the situation is different for everyone, and the solution they might be able to propose could never be helpful to everyone.
The issue is: it is most probably never going to change. The number one adjective fitting to describe a teenager will presumable always be “anxious”, because even though we think about our future all the time and have adults prancing around us at all times trying to show us how to properly “adult”, we have no idea what’s actually coming toward us, and it is terrifying.
To succeed in anything, you must first know what you want to succeed in, and that’s the first problem, isn’t it? How is a 16- to 18-year-old supposed to know what they want to do for the rest of their life? But everybody went through that. You're not the first one (or the last, for that matter). And how exactly is that supposed to reassure me, Karen?
The best advice I can give right now is “fake it ‘til you make it”, but I’m not sure that is good advice, given that the brick wall I currently see isn’t slowing down either and it’s kind of stressing me out, too. The next best advice I’ve got is “make it up along the way”, which, now that I’m thinking about it, seems about 137x better, so maybe just forget about the first one. Oh yeah, also listen to your teachers, because maybe there’s a reason why all the teachers constantly repeat the same 3 quotes (more or less). What I mean by that is there might be some truth to them, who knows. It certainly can’t hurt (that much) to try, right?
One last thing: if you look at the wall close enough it may seem even taller and more frightening than it did at first, but you might also be able to see a door. (Which is supposed to mean that facing your fears could be a great idea if you plan on ever overcoming them.)