I dug out my college essay – written when I was 17. This stood for a long time as one of the few pieces of writing I was confident enough in to share. A little quirky, but I’m grateful to be able to look back into the mind of my 17 year old self.
…
Zack Smith 10/17/11
“What Would I Say”
For many teenagers about to finish high school, there’s something they wish they had known before they began four short years ago. They wish for a lapse in physics, a deviation from logic or perhaps an act of magic which would allow them to communicate with their freshman selves. They seek to alter the journey they’ve experienced by offering their former selves some advice or guidance, perhaps to prevent an event from occurring or to give life to a “what if” fantasy that has haunted them, something they wished had happened.
If I were asked to share something with my freshman persona; if that loophole of time were discovered and I were face to face with myself at the age of fourteen, I would probably disappoint him at first. I’ve thought long and hard about what I would say, knowing that my former self would be eager for insight concerning his future. I would have to choose a phrase whose words could withstand hours of contemplation and dissection; a phrase that I, at fourteen, would have interpreted in such a way that would preserve my experiences through high school as I know them today.
“You turn out fine.”
I’m sure at first the boy I once was would gawk at me; a confused “that’s it?” look would grow upon his countenance as a rogue “what?” loosed itself from his rather unguarded lips at the time. But as my words sink in, my hope is that what I said will comfort him to the point of confident living. And I can say with confidence that my younger form wouldn’t use this as an excuse to make reckless decisions, as my responsibility was grown and strong before I got to high school. It has since been tested and developed, but not grown from nothing.
I plant my faith in those words’ ability to dull the edge of the unknown so that he has less apprehension towards the future as I did. I hope that in times of stress or strain he will be reminded of our brief confrontation and trudge on. It would make the difficulties of his future easier to get though mentally. After all, I would be preaching those words to the boy who has yet to spend two hockey seasons watching his teammates from the bench; the same boy who’s ready for work, but can’t comprehend how hard it will be; the one who wouldn’t mind having a job, but wouldn’t believe that in only three short summers he’d be putting in forty hours a week; the boy who can call up his grandmother just to talk about movies, her writing or how he is, but doesn’t, because he doesn’t know what he has until she’s gone. His group of friends haven’t started hanging out yet, and he won’t meet the girl he will spend three years with until the end of his freshman year. He can’t wait for lacrosse to start up, but he doesn’t know that by his junior year, it gets replaced by ultimate frisbee. He hasn’t rafted down the Colorado river and camped in the Grand Canyon yet, and he still lives in the old house on Orchard drive. And he won’t understand how much all that means to him until he is me.
The greatest way to measure how I’ve done the past few years is to reflect on myself now. I’m very happy with who I have become and what I’ve done. I wouldn’t change anything that has happened; there’s nothing I wish I could prevent and there’s nothing I wish I had said. Temporary pain has always been washed away by a family who has never left, and friends: some old, some new, some temporary, and even some everlasting.
I know myself fairly well, well enough to realize that the phrase “you turn out fine” would be very comforting to hear from someone who has seen the future. All seniors leaving high school, all who have ever left and all who will leave face an unknown future. They stare towards a thick, rolling fog and realize that every decision they make will affect how well they do in college and who they become as an adult. When I look towards the fog of my future, I wish there were some deviation from conventional physics which would allow me to meet face to face with myself at twenty-one. I don’t know what he would say, but all I want to hear is “you turn out fine.”