EIGHTEEN LOOKS LIKE THIS
june 5 2007 – june 5 2025
Today, I turn 18.
It’s so strange, I always thought ’18 is so old, you’re an adult! It’ll take forever for me to get there…’
But here I am. Already. I’m 18 and about to go out into the world on my own. Independence: financially, emotionally, I’m terrified I won’t be able to handle it.
I look back on my life and realize all the things I’ve learned.
What 17 taught me:
friendships, relationships, even family, they come and they go. As life moves on, you move with it. It’s scary and uncomfortable, but you figure it out along the way. Life never came with a handbook. You make it on your own.
For my eighteenth birthday, my mother gave me one of the best presents I could’ve asked for.
She got home Wednesday afternoon and told me to come outside and unload the car. I was confused when I got there and in the front seat was a… pet carrier?
My cousins the week before had introduced me to their newest kitten, a stray named Tallulah Roe. Tallulah spent the few days I was there snuggled up on the couch with me, napping together too. She was a tiny gray kitten, barely as big as my arm. And she was in that pet carrier. They had decided that she had chosen me, napping together and snuggling all the time was a sign. And now, she’s comfortably home with me in my room, with a crib and toys galore.
Speaking of new friends, I made a bunch at freshman connection a few weeks ago and we’re still talking! This one person, let’s call them Rose, they’re awesome! we have got so much in common from family to interests, even favorite foods or cartoon characters!
And this guy, let’s call him Jayce, is pretty cool too! He’s that goofy background character that does cartwheels in the corner while someone’s having a crisis and I love it!
I’m so glad to have met the two of them as well as “Anna” and “Payton”. I got lucky and have found my tribe early on and I’m sure there’s only more to come when I go to school in the fall!
Now that I have Bell, I might be taking her to college and letting my little brother take care of Pizza. He’s already got my newer desktop, why not throw my lizard into the mix?
It’s gonna be hard, to let my family watch me walk out that door knowing I will be on my own from then on out. Of course they’ll always be there for me if I need them but now, I’m independent. Left to my own devices, at the mercy of the world around me.
18 is a huge step but I have friends and family there for me, there to back me up when I need them. And in the end, that’s really what matters.
So, as I take the world by storm, I’m now able to do it independently, make my own footsteps in the sand instead of following the ones there before.
College, Actually 
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