When I've barely tasted the world

It occurred to me that I’ve barely tasted the world. In high school, I’ve found myself increasingly consumed in the life that’s right in front of me that sometimes I forget there’s a world and a life outside of what I’ve seen. 

My life, as it rightly should today, consists of classes, studying, working out, eating, and going to the occasional dance on a Saturday night.  In all honesty, this is what my life has consisted of for the past 17 years. I joined some girls in my dorm this past week and from the start of the conversation, I could sense just how much more of the world they had encountered. One girl, whom I enjoy talking to a lot, spoke of going to clubs in Hong Kong, going out with friends at midnight, and traveling around Italy by herself. She spoke of all the people she met, all the wild (and perhaps slightly rebellious) things she did, and her experiences. I have a low-quality poker face and I don’t think I hid my surprise well. 

Going to clubs? Going out at night? At home, I have never left my house after 10 PM. I swear. I’ve never even gone outside in the dark by myself. I’ve never been to a club. I’ve rarely spent a night not at my house or at school. I’ve never even traveled by myself. 

I do not feel like I’m missing out on anything, as I quite enjoy the predictability of my current lifestyle. It’s merely been enjoyable to consider all the things I haven’t done in my life yet, a break from the to-do list in front of me. Sometimes it’s hard to imagine a life where I don’t have to do homework or study. Perhaps it’s gotten so ingrained in my lifestyle that I can’t imagine what I would do if I didn’t have a pile of papers to write or history texts to read. I suppose this is what people refer to as the “high school bubble”. It is the years where students become so ingrained in work they forget another lifestyle and other things exist. 

In that same conversation, my friend also told me about how many more types of people exist in this world…more types than I can imagine. Boarding schools attract a certain type of student and sometimes we forget that other people exist in this world. I’ve become too familiar with the people I interact with on a daily basis that I find myself utterly clueless to the people my friend talks about. My friend tells me that, like all my limited experiences, I’ve already met a very limited number of people. Though Andover’s campus in unequivocally diverse, nothing compares to the level of diversity I’m bound to encounter when I enter the real world. 

In a way, I’m curious whether college will bring about more firsts. Perhaps one must wait until after school to truly experience another lifestyle and meet more types of people. Or perhaps I will never experience the glamour my friend describes in her independent adventures. Even though I sometimes feel as if I’ve met many kinds of people and experienced a lot of things, my friend warns me that I have much more to see. Another really important realization I’ve had is that due to my limited experiences, my perspective about many things is also quite narrow. Perhaps if I experience more, I will become more empathetic towards others. One thing I can almost guarantee through hearing my friend’s experiences is that movies aren’t totally inaccurate :)