TO BE NINETEEN

Nineteen is an interesting age to be. You’re young enough to get away with dumb decisions because you’re a teenager and old enough not to have to worry about getting frozen at club entrances by scary-looking bouncers. But you’re months away from losing that all-forgiving ‘teen’ tag altogether. You start feeling obligated to do something with your life other than spending your days in college waiting on that M-Pesa text from your parents like your life depended on it. It’s not the most fun of realizations when it hits you that your YOLO days are nearing their end, trust me. Not to mean that you can’t have fun once you’re older, but you realize that you don’t know yourself as well as you’d want to.

As a disclaimer, I’m about to start waxing philosophical, which isn’t something I do very well. I’ll just allow this stream of consciousness to take over. I’ve always felt like society created a path for us that we’re expected to follow, problem being some of us like wandering off. Go to school, get a job, climb the corporate ladder, everyone’s happy. But when I really think about it, I really don’t want to live my life like that, at least not entirely. I see a lot of older people who would fit right in on the set of ‘The Walking Dead’ because of how zombie-like they seem. There are few things out there that scare me as much as the thought of getting caught up in a daily routine I’m not a big fan of. Maybe I’m just young and naive and don’t know a thing about the ‘real world’ as people like to put it. But the point is that I wouldn’t want to live my life like it came with a ‘How To’ Manual.