I thought high school would last forever. The girl who was swept along by a mob of tall scary teenagers on her first day of freshman year couldn’t comprehend the breadth of four years in that huge unfamiliar place. Yet, the four years zipped by at light speed and she graduated. I graduated.

In hindsight, high school felt like a coloring book. The outlined shapes of academics, extracurriculars, and standardized tests were drawn in permanence. They were just waiting for me to attempt to fill. I colored in the pages as best I could, and while some parts were marked with frustration, lack of sleep, and exasperation, the better parts fostered confidence, independence, and a sense of belonging in me. Yes, my high school life felt predetermined, but I can’t deny that those four years began the cultivation of my mental and emotional growth.

A large part of me still can’t believe I have made it this far, and that I have even finished my first year of college. Perhaps I was prematurely booted out of the train that was supposed to be the smooth transition from high school into college, and it has left me coughing in the dust, running, struggling to catch up. And when I look out across the train tracks into the horizon of “College and Life in General,” there are no pre-drawn shapes for me to color in. If there are, they are too big and abstract for me to see.

***

Oftentimes I feel separated from my reality. It’s as if my physical self is starring in my own TV show and my conscience is watching from above. But I’m not at the title sequence of the first episode, where characters are just being introduced and the setting is being laid out. I’m in more of the mid-season crossroads, observing myself act on a set that is my real life: “What will college Katie do now? How will this decision affect her life down the road? Tune in to next week’s episode to find out!”

Maybe I feel this way because my reality is incongruent to the perfect, Stock photo-like images of college that social media and Youtube graced me with. Maybe it’s because so many people have told me that college is the “best four years of your life” and it is where you make “lifelong connections” and I am trying too hard to fit my life into that mold. With all that has happened within the past year, the incongruencies were to be expected. But I feel like I’ve still made the most out of the year given the circumstances. Things for next year are also looking up. What more could I possibly want?

Right now the answer is “I don’t know.” Sometimes I wish I knew exactly what I wanted–what I want to study, where I want to go after I graduate, what I want out of my life. If that were the case, my entire life would just be a huge coloring book, wouldn’t it? Predictable, predetermined, a bit boring. So perhaps I have been feeling this way because I am finally starting to live in the present. Maybe I haven’t been needing to look for any metaphorical shapes to color in–I can whip out my own marker and draw my own course. Maybe I never needed a train to provide me a soft landing into college. And maybe I shouldn’t view my life as a TV show. After all, this is my real life, and there is no script.