Ch-ch-changes

They say that college is supposed to be a chance to push the reset button and start things over. Whoever you were, whatever kind of person people assumed you to be back home has no barring on who you can become. College is an event noteworthy enough to promote change, enormous amounts of change, some times more change than one really wants to make in the beginning. Or at least that was what I had been hearing for the longest time. I got speeches from my mother about “the dangers of alcohol” as if the moment she turned her back I was going to become an instant alcoholic stashing bottles of vodka in my mini fridge and seeking refuge and a guide for my staggering steps in shady mysterious men I had never before met. And much the same was to be had about “the positive correlation between college and drug experimentation” and “experimentation” in general. My pastor started speaking of “making good decisions” and not straying from the path of righteousness. I mean, I understand. Some people needed that, but I was not one of those people. I needed no forewarning. I was the last person to need those little lectures, so much so that I was pretty much pathetic.
I was that girl in high school who was infatuated with books; I couldn’t get enough of them. My nose was most often buried chapters deep in some novel, classic or contemporary, the bigger the book the better. I did my homework like I would burst into flames if I didn’t. It was terrible. When I had nothing else to do, I headed to the library just to soak up the intellectual atmosphere. On weekends, unlike my fellow classmates who would go out and get mind-numbingly inebriated, I would finish up anything had for some reason not finished earlier, read more of those dreadful books, or work pointlessly writing one of my own. The parties I attended usually involved popcorn and cheesy slasher flicks, or music and the pool table in Finn’s garage while gorging ourselves on his mother’s delicious cooking. Yes, I did other things unrelated to paper and pens. I was in high school, not a completely recluse. Though, I swear, I still had one of the most boring social lives of which I had ever heard.
I guess I wasn’t boring, per se. I was practical, but I had a feeling that practicality translated to utter dullness in the eyes of my peers. I had this thing about not letting myself have fun. I was so completely mental about it; purposely depriving my id from seeing the light of day and all of that Freudian junk. I must have because no one else was holding me back and yet I was always so incredibly restrained. It was a gift and a curse, my practicality. Adults found it charming that that I was so “responsible” and “sensible”, but those and their synonyms were words of taboo to me. I was eighteen, an adult in the minds of most. I could vote, kill myself smoking, buy all of the porn I wanted, and lose my entire life’s savings gambling, and yet I was completely un-evolved socially. I was socially retarded. Okay, so not completely. I had gone to some parties, real ones. I had been in the presence of people doing completely stupid rebellious teenage things, but I had never been happy about it. I had always been the bystander never a starring role. I had always wanted to be but I had this strange fear of doing something wrong for no reason. That I wouldn’t be as able to get away with it as everyone else. It would be my luck that the one time I let myself live I would meet with the consequences not yet seen by those seasoned veterans.
I was physically incapable of letting loose, doing things on a whim, seizing the day, like the gene for it was cut out of my genetic make up completely. I had tried to change it, but it felt like just a natural rut in which I constantly found myself. I planned and stressed over every detail of everything I did or planned to do. The cons always appeared as too much of a risk and the pros never outshined the looming darkness that was the unknown consequences to follow. But it was going to be different in college. There were no preconceived expectations of what kind of person I was supposed to be. No one knew me there. No one cared. Whoever I chose to be was going to be the person they’d come to know, not the person I once was. That was history, ancient history. And for once, it could stay that way if it was what I wanted, if I would let it.
Things didn’t always have to go down hill when they changed. Good things could come from change and I had figured that just about any change that I would find myself making would be an upgrade from my former self.