Counting the Days

It suddenly just hit me how little time I have until I leave for college...I really wish that time would just slow down a little bit. Graduation was over two weeks ago, though it felt like yesterday I was excitedly putting on my cap and gown, walking down the aisle with a diploma in hand. There's only 40 days left to my summer vacation, and I'm desperately grasping on to every last bit of freedom and home comfort before I go.
Honestly, right when I graduated I felt a feeling of relief and just overall excitement to be done and over with high school, which I appropriately liked to refer to as a prison. Several days after I left, I began to reminisce over the three years I spent at school... basically the three years that shaped me as an individual and taught me everything I know now. Of course there were the ugly times as well, which I like to suppress in the back of my mind (or else i'd suffer huge cringe attacks). But those memories also just made the high school experience more substantial and meaningful to me, no matter how clumsy I was or awkward. Throughout these years in high school, I learned the most essential piece of advice anyone should follow: don't give a crap about what other people think. It's not as easy as you think, but I noticed I grew as a person by slowly ridding my mind of the paranoid thoughts of others judging me, when in actuality, they probably aren't judging at all. I'm pretty content with the person I am today, and high school is the biggest factor to these improvement on my personality and mindset. You gotta embrace the awkward times to move forward on them.