At 19 you’re kind of at a strange stage in your life. You’re no longer a kid but don’t quite feel like an adult. You think you have more figured out than you actually do. You may be in school, you may be working, or you may be doing both, and everything ends up being harder than you anticipated. You may still live at home, or you may be completely and utterly alone in a new city you know nothing about. Your days blur into an endless cycle of repetition. Doing the same tedious activities of daily life, over and over, never having the time to do something new for yourself. Simple tasks start to feel harder, like doing the dishes or laundry or maybe even just getting out of bed. You sleep less, you eat less, you spend the time you should be spending taking care of yourself doing things that don’t really end up mattering in the long run. But in the moment, they feel like the most important things in the world. You start to feel grown up but at the same time still feel like a twelve-year-old wanting to ask your mother to tuck you in at night, so you’ll feel safe. You’re growing up. Whether that’s a bad or a good thing is up to you.

Everyone says you’re in the period of your life where you make friends that will last a lifetime, but that’s easier said than done. It’s a lot harder to make friends in school than people make it seem. You’re so focused on not dropping out that you forget to have fun. Everything interesting passes you by and you don’t realize until it’s already gone. Everyone seems to have someone, whereas you have no one. You watch everyone have fun around you while you’re stuck in time. You miss out on school events because you don’t know anyone at your school to go with you. You’re told, “Just go by yourself, make friends when you get there,” but you’re so scared it won’t happen, and you’ll be stuck standing in the middle of an event hall with no one to talk to while conversations circle around you. So, you stay home. You watch the night from afar through social media posts. You feel as though you’re not doing things right, like there’s something wrong with you because you’re not having as good a time as everyone else seems to be having. You’re scared you’ll never have that, that you’ll never get to the sort of happiness that makes you feel like you’re not wasting the good years of your life doing something mundane. You feel like you’re going crazy. You’re alone but you know you shouldn’t be. You should be enjoying your time being young, but you can’t. You want to, more than anything in the world, you want to have the sort of life you’re apparently supposed to have at this age, but you just can’t do it. You can’t find the people you can’t find the fun. You’re lost.

Being 19 is weird. You’re legal, but adults are still going to view you as a kid. But then kids view you as an adult. You’re sort of stuck in this in-between stage that you’re not quite sure how to get out of. Even if you were, you’re not completely sure you’d want to. If you come out of the stage that means you have to move forward, you must create a life for yourself. And you won’t know how, not yet at least. People around you seem to have their shit together, and you’re going to question yourself over and over and over again until you no longer feel like a person, and you feel more like an experiment. Your life is an experiment to see how well you’ll do in life: if you’ll be able to pull yourself out of your own thoughts and create a career, or if you’ll slowly start to fade into your own mind and become nothing but thought bubbles along the pages of a comic book about the difficulties of early adulthood. Everyone says, “Fake it till you make it,” but you feel as if you’ll be forever faking it. Some people don’t make it, and maybe you’ll be one of those people. But then, maybe you won’t. You’re not going to know until you do, and it’s terrifying. So now that you know how it feels to be 19, are you excited?