PERS ; SEND OUT AN SOS CALL.

you don't think of high school anymore.

you don't remember the time your crush drove you home, blasting ghetto music for kicks. you don't remember all the places you used to eat lunch. you don't remember the crazy things you tried to pull off as fashion as a stupid freshman. you don't remember why picking a homecoming limo was such a big deal and why people threw hissy fits over it. you don't remember the reasons behind fallouts or why everyone bitched about each other so much. you don't remember hating high school, but you don't really remember liking it all that much either.

most of all, you don't remember why you were so insecure. teenagers all go through their phases but yours seemed unnecessarily overdramatic. you do remember writing in your yellow notebooks and on blogs here and there about all the things people said about you, nitpicking and finding too many things wrong with yourself, traits you tried too hard to fix that they just ended up fighting and staying, anyway. you decried your lack of experiences and hated "not having a life"; little did you know that you knew a lot more than you thought you did, did a lot more than you thought you did, and that all those times staying in your room taught you discipline, if anything.

you don't regret your insecurity, nor do you regret those nights of introspection. you are a bit curious how you got out of that teenage funk. you're three months away from becoming a real adult, no -teen stuck to your age. you know you're mature but you're scared to be mature by age, scared to know that now you are expected to be mature. you know you've improved but you don't think too much about it. in truth, you couldn't really describe yourself if you could. maybe that was it; you didn't dwell too much on all the things people said about you, all the judgments and expectations surrounding you, and you just let it float right on. or maybe it was the people you started surrounding yourself with, people who didn't degrade you or make you feel awkward, people who were accepting of all your flaws.

that, coupled with the realization that everyone, really everyone has his or her own problems, is enough to make it through.

photo | ellie ▲ ; flickr