Adults are, like, this mess of sadness and phobias.

So, with many of the students I'm tutoring getting all revved up for SAT's and AP exams this month, I dove back into my journals from high school. In doing so, I recovered the following entry from the last month of my senior year of high school, and couldn't help but post it on my blog (with apologies to the privacy of my 17-year-old self.) It's uncanny how much, despite my predictions, I still relate to myself back then, and that darned obsession with musing over memory and the nature of identity.


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Can't sleep...I CANNOT STOP THINKING ABOUT COLLEGE. And yes, I realize that I obsess often over that fact in this journal, that I rave repeatedly about how little time is left, how excited I am, so on and so forth. But it's like the reality of it (and simultaneously, the surrealism of it all) just keeps on hitting me like a wall of bricks...in a good way.

I keep thinking back to this time last year, when last year's senior class was absolutely fraught with senioritis - and how crazy it is to be in their shoes now - in the shoes of Camron and Katharina and Reshad and Allison and Desi and Josh and Brad and Jordy and Carly and everybody. Sure, I feel like a senior, but I guess because AP exams and yearbooks and the whole cap-and-gown deal have yet to actually manifest themselves as real parts of my life, I have a hard time grasping that THIS is really happening to me.

I remember those posters way back when that hung in some classrooms and said, "Ten years from now, it won't matter what jeans you wore..." blah blah - but it's true - I know that even as immediate and familiar and significant and REAL as my life feels to me right now, this is nothing in the scheme of things. I will go on and meet new people, gain and lose talents and hobbies, see new places, learn infinitely, and change and change and change...and someday, I will be somewhere, reading this entry and perhaps hardly even being able to relate to it or feel all that I feel at this point in my life. The halls of my high school will feel like antiques, and childish, only vestiges of familiarity remaining among their tiles and rooms and lockers and endless, endless circles. God, I can't wait to quit running around in circles.

You know what gets me? The estrangement I feel from my own memories - as if I witness them merely in a movie or a dream, not steadfast in reality. All of these things come back to me in bits - the smell of my body spray from middle school, an old favorite song, journal entries from the past, recalling books and TV shoes and magazines from years long gone - and even though these things are a part of me, they feel so foreign.

I have changed so much it scares me. I remember the pathetic lull of insecurity from my early soccer team days. I see pictures of myself at seven in my Tae Kwon Do uniform. I know what it is to feel deathly afraid of the world and still excited at the idea of a first kiss. It's this plethora of memories I have, and yet it feels like a storybook, an anthology of experiences that happened to someone else. And to think that in a few years, this very moment will fade from me as well, recede into the abyss of my memory, and eventually, come to feel entirely alien to me.

I am not sure if I am conveying any of this the way I wish to, and the abstract semantics are frustrating me...