Road Trip.

“It’s time to grow up...”
“But you’re too young to do that.”

It seems as though reaching the peak of adolescence is a never ending maze. We’re given hints on which way is the right way to go, only to be found at a dead end, forced to change route and wander aimlessly towards the exit that seems so hard to find.

Eighteen.
Such an odd age in America, isn’t it? We’re old enough to kill ourselves with cigarettes and live alone, but not old enough to rent a car or drink some champagne.

It’s the year most of us graduate and move onto bigger and better things. “Life”. As if entering high school wasn’t confusing enough, as soon as we think we’ve finished the rigorous journey, we’re thrown into another challenge.
The real world. I don’t know about you, but I thought I was in a real world already. Why the name? It sounds as if we’ve been living in a fabricated, cushioned cell for the past 18 years of our lives and now we’re finally opening the door to see life for what it really is.

When did this become the Matrix’s storyline?

“Stay calm, you’ll be successful” they say. How the hell are we supposed to stay calm when society makes the “real world” sound like a tank full of sharks with laser beams attached to their heads waiting to feast on us the second we turn the tassel on our graduation cap?
No wonder everyone has a crisis at 18. We’re at the middle of the road on where one side is our childhood innocence and the other side is…well, the real world.
We’re just standing there looking back and forth, waiting for some kind of answer to fall from the sky, but already knowing which way we have to go. We can’t return to the past. Which is what scares us because as much as we know we must move onto another chapter, we still can’t take that bookmark out of the page we were on back then and just keep reading.

So, we have to just brace ourselves and accept that we will be thrown to the sharks, and will be lost and scared and maybe even devoured. So it’s up to us to make it out alive.

Every man for himself.