For seventeen years of my life I have been told what to do and what not to do. Just today I was told that I wasn’t allowed to walk down a certain hallway when coming back from lunch. Everyday I am confronted by authority figures who question every choice and decision I make. Where I am allowed to sit, what I should spend my money on, and who I should associate myself with.

In forty-two days I will be 18.

Old enough to smoke my lungs black and cover myself with tattoos. Old enough to vote, make choices on a national scale, and get married if I want to.

In forty-two days I will be an adult.

I have been spending my weekends painstakingly and meticulously hand crafting my college applications. Filling my brain with numbers about university student-facility ratio, and diversity rates. I’ve been swallowing statistics about financial aid that match pie charts that don’t mean anything to me. My computer is a filling cabinet full of locations, photos of campuses, and college student’s first hand accounts of their experience. I have a stack of at least a hundred unopened letters colleges have sent me, from NYU to small community colleges in Cedar Rapids. But I haven’t opened very many of them.

Because I have grades to maintain, assignments to get done, essays to write, and calculous homework to try and wrap my brain around.

I am simultaneously being thrusted into the adult world while being held captive inside the cage of adolescence. In the same day I am being told I have to get a pass from the office, for being ten seconds late; but then also asked overwhelming question by teachers like “What do you plan on doing after high school?” A deadly question that leaves me in a cold sweat. It is closely followed by “What do you plan to study?” and “What colleges have you applied to?” A tornado that leaves me breathless. I sometimes just want to say it: I don’t know.

I can feel myself being torn apart by my own seams. I know I have passions, dreams, aspirations. I know what I think I want to study. But asking me to make choices about my future, decisions that will set me down a certain track for the rest of my life isn’t fair. Being young means being constantly reminded by my superiors that I have so much to learn. It means being undermined constantly and being questioned because of my choices. My maturity is questioned every day, no matter what I do.

So why now? Why after seventeen years of being told I am ‘just a kid’, am I now allowed to make such drastic and insane choices about my future?

I’m not asking the question because I’m not ready. I swear I would never complain. What I know is that this process is crippling. It is the kind of pressure you crack under.

I just have to tell myself to take a deep breath. That this, and graduation isn’t the end. It’s something else entirely – it is just the beginning. And there is something beautiful about that – so don’t give up yet. Don’t let yourself drown. You have to drop the negative experiences at the door, because you can’t carry it with you – you can’t let them bury you. This process will be overwhelming, I promise you that. But what I also promise is that you have an arsenal of people, teachers, friends and family who have been through the same long distance run. And they will be cheering for you at the finish line.