rebelling against low expectations
I used to hate people. I didn’t hate them so much as I thought they hated me, and that’s why I hated them. Bad philosophy, huh? Ever since I was the new kid at a large church in sixth grade, I’ve been trying to figure out what it means to live in a world with other people. This adventure has been filled with ups, downs, and a variety of creative hiding places. I’ve been hit in the face by...
Six weeks into my first semester of college, I’m hunkered down in my dorm room with plenty of blankets and a lot of emotions. Panic dropped me off at the train station of college life. Now I’ve stepped off the platform to a wasteland of existentialism. Confused, empty, tired. Needy. Those feelings I’ve always wrestled with edge their way back into my mind. I covered them well, the doubts and...
Cardboard boxes line my wall. They’re full of towels and clothes and shower shoes with cool little holes in the foam for drainage. Yep, if you didn’t guess already… I’m moving. Moving to college in three short weeks. And if I’m honest, I’m scared. I’m terrified of the unknown, which is only intensified by the variables COVID-19 introduced to the college situation. It’s weird enough to move to a...
We have stretched ourselves thin for too long. We are writers, STEMers, and musicians. We rehearse with the worship team or change diapers in the nursery, work 40 hours a week at a minimum wage job, and stay up all night filing information into our brains for AP and college courses. And while we’re at it, maybe we could start an Instagram account, no, a blog, no, a book! Because there’s a whole...
Thumbs swipe across an oily plate of glass. Pupils fixed on a blur of changing colors. Sans serif font writes captions underneath aesthetic coffee mugs, curly lettering, and faces crinkled with laughter at the beach. By the forty-third swipe, your brain doesn’t even bother to see what posts are saying. All you see is boredom. All you feel is your head thudding with the pound of pointlessness...
Cowering behind a register in my dull teal Food Lion uniform, I feel like I’m failing pretty miserably at changing the world. I see a dad telling his five-year-old daughter it’s okay to be sad, then he starts crying as he explains their dog died that day and my own eyes start to burn. I see white-haired ladies struggling to lift their groceries out of the cart and some of them tell me about the...
Sometimes I just feel like everything I do is pointless. No point in writing, if I had anything to say in the first place; my words will be forgotten by tomorrow. No point in school work, that persistent obligation; it’s all just a scheme to keep me busy with information that has no application to my existence. We humans are determined to assign some sort of significance to this thing called life...
My flight was scheduled for mid-afternoon at the Miami airport. I spent the morning in a coffee shop, where I ordered a large latte, full of that dark magic called caffeine. Bad decision. Twenty minutes later, I felt like I was going to lose my breakfast, I was so tense even breathing hurt, and the only way I could think of to cope was curling up in my seat and closing my eyes, just as the lunch...
From blue crayon sketches to squeaky violin recitals to Disney murder mystery novels, hobbies have long been a part of my life. I’ve hated the hours of practice, hated the pieces that went in the trash, hated the wasted time. But if I could reclaim that time for another purpose, I wouldn’t. In fact, I’d probably invest still more into my hobbies. My sketches may not be featured in some New York...
I wasn’t prepared for the pictures. Girls who had forgotten my name posed in prom dresses with guys I hadn’t allowed myself to like. To them, I was nothing more than some kid in chemistry class. Even the girls who went without dates wouldn’t bother to invite me. So I imagined the evening they must have had. I wondered what it would be like to wear that flowing ball gown, to go out to...
rebelling against low expectations
