By Lucas de Paula
Graduating Editor-in-Chief
I just got off a phone call with my dad, hot tears leaking from my eyes. I told him about getting rejected from the school of my dreams, how I feel like community college is the graveyard of all my ambitions, how much I hate running and yet how I have all the talent for it. I reminisce on the supercut of my high school years and feel how fast the scenes flew by. I feel my youth, and time in this comfortable bubble, pressing against my entire being. I look at the calendar and with a sinking feeling, I realize I’ll graduate in a few weeks. I never thought it would end like this.
Even as a child, I’ve always seen the world so colorfully. I wanted to be a writer, then therapist, president, fashion designer and back to writer again. I’ve carried my ambitions and ardent lust for life with me. Sometimes I feel too creative for my physical self; how I write flowery poetry in my head to pass time, or how I see my life as a riveting movie. I bring these ideas to life to cope with my very existence.
It wasn’t until I joined Rampage that I was tested, not only in terms of writing. How many people could I interview? How many sports events could I photograph? What were the stories on campus that never grazed the eyes and ears of the public? Besides building journalistic skills, I fell in love with people and words.
In this past year of high school, my life went off script from what I thought would happen. I sentenced myself to five APs, maintained a summer job that infinitely inched itself into the school year, vigorously wrote college essays during lunchtime, while attempting to run in Varsity Cross Country and maintain a shred of my social life. I completely lost myself in the shuffle.
But maybe that’s life. I’ve spent my whole time yearning, idolizing the perfect narrative. One of no struggles. In complete transparency, I’ve gotten everything I’ve always wanted. I became Rampage’s Editor-in-Chief, and the highly sought-after job opening at the Starbucks, two minutes from my house. I have the purest friends, traveled the world and am a healthy, happy adolescent living in Southern California. Then why do I feel this existential dissonance?
It’s time to reject the glossy perfection of my ideal fictional life. I’m going to the school I admittedly looked down on people for attending, and I’m soothing this medical-grade burnout like sunburn. I’ll let myself break further still, shattering every belief I have against the pavement because I know I’ll be there to reassemble myself stronger. The light enters through the cracks anyway.
And so I leave my quadrennial haven, maybe not ready, but hungry for the world. I’ll keep surprising myself and the refreshingly uncomfortable situations I always find myself in. I’ll count the angels that keep gracing my life. I’m not the person I was four years ago, but there is no amount of money you could offer me to do it all over again.
Every moment, every success, every failure, breakdown, doubt, lover, friend, teacher, belief that I bore witness to, is part of me. I no longer wish to be scarlessly untouched. The cracks pave the way; the very ones that give me character.
While I’m not sure what I’ll be doing in a year (or even what I’m having for dinner tonight), I know the movie will keep rolling. The movie of my very dreams. For now, I have to chart forward, I have to say goodbye. I have outgrown Temple City like the unkempt dark roots overtaking the blonde on my scalp. I’ll snip them off, trudge farther, meet myself deeper, live lighter and fall in love with all the possibilities that could be. My life is a mosaic of light and dark, and I’m just 18.
Life is a constant goodbye, a sudden death. But from the ashes of my deepest passions and ambitions, life will rise from them. I trust in the plot that runs in my mind, that everything is for a reason. I’ll tie myself further to the web of my fate, and trust in the invisible hands that lead me. It’s led me this far right?