Growing up

What started out as a simple road trip for a couple of friends to take during their last summer as college students has slowly become more. In a very cliché manner, the actual road trip part has become a mere representation of a larger journey. A journey to find answers to questions that perhaps cannot be answered. To me this trip is about finding out who I am, where I belong, what I want to do with my life. Maybe it’s stupid and this whole idea is naïve but maybe answers are out there. Maybe you just have to lose yourself to find them. This trip, it’s about finding my place, my answers. It’s about being twenty-one and having fun the way kids are supposed to before they grow up. It’s about making memories and leaving behind things I’d like to forget. It’s about taking care of “what ifs” and “could have beens.” Mostly this trip is about living. About living the one life were given without regret. No one wants to look back on his or her life and think, “I should’ve done this” or “I should’ve done that.“ We’re young, we’re healthy, we’re free; we have to take advantage of these things while we can because soon enough they’ll change.

I wrote that first part a couple of weeks ago and since then ive been thinking about a lot of different stuff. I've been thinking about growing up and what that means. I am 21, I am a year from graduating college, from having my own “real” life. What do I want to do with that? Shouldn’t I know the answer to that question? I still think of myself as a kid. It doesn’t seem that long ago that I got my drivers license, or turned eighteen. My mom still makes my doctor’s appointments, files my taxes, deals with my insurance. I am still a kid and I feel like that needs to change. I've always said that I don't really want to grow up and be an adult, that I would live the “college life” for as long as possible. While living life this way is fun, what comes of it? Where do I go next? I think that, inevitably, I will live some form of this “college life” for the next year, but at the same time I am going to make an effort to grow up a little bit or at least figure out what growing up means. I think this trip is a good place to start that.