not quite what I wanted.

"...seems like nothing is black and white anymore,
shades of grey and I feel a weight over my shoulder
it's tough getting older
I always thought that I knew where I'd want to go
but now I'm here and I find that I'm still getting colder
it's kind of tough getting older..."

Remember being a kid? You had the best part of your life in front of you. Everything mattered so much - and so little. You'd cry yourself to sleep over the smallest things, but when you woke up in the morning, you had a fresh start and everything was okay. You could be yourself because everyone else's opinion didn't matter that much. Your clothes didn't have to match, and Disney movies were the best. A snow day was the event of the year. It didn't matter that you had to make it up later. The surprise day off and the following hours and hours of snowball fights and sledding and snowman-building were more than worth an extra day spent in school when you should already be off for summer break. The best thing about traveling was staying in a hotel with a swimming pool. The laughter and innocence of childhood makes it one of the best times of most people's lives.

What I remember most about being a kid is the way I looked up to people who were older than I was, and therefore "cool." I had a babysitter when I was seven who lived across the street from me. She was fifteen or sixteen when she started to babysit for my family, and kept babysitting for us until she went to college. She ended up getting married to one of my childhood friend's older brother. She could do cartwheels and draw exact replicas of Disney cartoons without tracing them. Somewhere in my piles of papers, I still have a Snow White forest scene that she drew for me. She would bring her algebra homework and complain about how hard it was. I thought she was one of the coolest people ever. The high schoolers I'd see pass by at NRCA or at church were cool simply because they were teenagers. I had a camp counselor when I was nine who also babysat me and my siblings for a couple years. I still keep in touch with her. She was someone else I looked up to.

Anyway, I thought that when I got to their age, I would be automatically cool just like them. I thought that I'd have a million friends and drive a carful around most of the time and blast music through my open windows and sunroof. I thought I'd be getting phone calls pretty much daily and going out with guys whom I really liked. I thought I'd be babysitting so much that I'd have a full bank account even after going out with friends all the time. I thought I'd have a fun summer job and go to the beach every weekend. I thought I'd graduate high school and go off to college (the decision as to which college would be easy) and meet "the one" and get married immediately after graduation. I knew what I wanted to do with my life and I had a plan.

Unfortunately, my childhood dreams didn't come true. I had an awkward freshman and sophomore year, with friendships that were fickle at best. Toward the end of sophomore year, my life started to get better, and junior year was much improved. During the spring/beginning of summer of my junior year, I began to get to know some people that I had more or less known for years, and became friends with them. Because of that, this year - my senior year - has been the best yet. But even so, it hasn't been perfect. Almost every one of my friends...this year and every year before now...has let me down in some major way. Some of them I'm still friends with. Some I'm not. The freedom I admired so much in the teenagers I looked up to as a child I really haven't had. My babysitting jobs have happened, but not as much as I would've wanted, so my bank account isn't as high as it could've been. And college decisions? Oh so difficult.

Being "grown up" is not as easy as I thought it would be from a seven-year-old's point of view.