As I read my Dads latest blog on kids being kids, tears streamed down my face. At the bottom of our blog you may notice that we have a time counter that indicates how long we have been cruising. I watch as the seconds tick by. Each second I realized is one second closer to the close of our trip, and us going back to normal life. Then I thought what is normal life? Normal life is schooling, drama and tests for me, but now all has changed. I notice small things I’ve been missing. I noticed that normal life didn’t have to be that way. I made it that way. Although I realize I need some pressure, I noticed that the amount I put on myself was just torture. I would stay up all night until my 6:30 AM alarm went off studying and studying. My eyes would go blurry. I would give up, crying, telling my self I wasn’t good enough. I was going to fail.

I felt the pressure of my whole future riding on one middle school test. I started to evolve an adult like face, dark circles carved crevasses under my eyes. Then drama, that I would choose to invest upon. Why did I ever do this to myself? I realized how much this trip meant to me. I stared at the world moving around me. Everyone moving on and on, never stopping to thank that they could breathe, that they could walk. Small miracles that went unnoticed such as how our sun is so perfectly far away from earth, we can live in a perfect climate. The microscopic plankton working hard to provide almost half of the oxygen we breathe. But the world always moves sounds and lights crowd around me. Shoving me into my small box I just tried to escape from. Fears and “I can’ts and maybe one days” nailed me down. I have not yet found how to escape but have been able for what seems like for the first time since I was kid, to loosen the screws. I jolted while writing this. I still am a kid. So why not live like one before the chance is gone?