The path out of childhood often feels like one of the moving walkways you see in airports; there is a single direction you are being pushed in, and you are flanked by barriers on either side to keep your from deviating. Most of childhood is spent half-sleepwalking, half-rebelling against this life-directional conveyor belt. Especially by the time we arrive at high school, our final highly structured day jail, most of us cannot wait to cross the finish line and be deemed “adults.”
Yet a life spent on a single clear path leaves most of us ill-prepared for the vagaries of adult responsibilities and adult freedom — least of all for the freedom without responsibility that is the 18-year-old student’s experience of college. Having grown used to seeing the path in front of us, we now find life an endless fog of possibilities, most of which we aren’t experienced or imaginative enough to even realize are available to us. Freedom from the conveyor belt, more often than not, is so terrifying that we begin desperately to seek out replacements.
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