There’s really not much I can write about at 10 in the morning, so I apologize in advance.

My dad would always reiterate to my friends and I how often he had to remind me as a kid, to slow things down. I always wanted more from what my age and capabilities allowed, and he knew it would be a problem once I actually come to a point in my life when I just feel at a lost for all the years that had just gone by; years I will have spent doing things that I wasn’t yet to be doing. I always wanted more out of everything, out of people, out of myself most especially, and I have had troubles dealing with mediocrity.

 I guess it comes with this recurring feeling I have that I will die young. And I don’t mean that in a melodramatic, teenage angst sense (because that would not count for I am, starting tomorrow, no longer a teenager huhuhu), but in the sense that I have seen and gone through enough to know that we always think there is going to be more time. Then it runs out.

 We consume the resources that we have, thinking it will always be provided for, until it dries up. We take the people who love us for granted, until they leave or pass away. We waste time on things we don’t have the luxury to waste time on, until the day comes when time is no longer ours to spend. We always think we’ll fall in love again, until the day comes when we lose the love of our life and not know what life is like before or since. We live like there will always be tomorrow, when everything and everyone in our lives are there at a standstill, just where we wanted them to be – until we wake up and find ourselves stripped of all things we once knew.

 I always ask more of myself and of everyone around me because this whole thing – this life that we’re all so scared to mess up or work hard for or grow up into facing – is borrowed. The things and people in your life right now won’t always be there, you will never be as young as you are right at this very moment, and you won’t always have the blessing to wake up to a new day and make better choices. There is now, though, and quite frankly, that is all we have.

 I am sometimes too hard on myself, too much a perfectionist and too specific on the things I want to achieve and how I would want to go about it. I can be too independent, a tad bit controlling, and day-by-day more obsessed with finding out ways to live my life differently. But that is just who I am, and it has worked for me since the day I made my ten-year plan as a nine year old.

Be grateful and move on to better things. We all have to grow up sometime, to stop depending on the things and people around us for change and a better environment. We all will have to do things on our own, and instead of wasting time waiting on everyone else to do the hard work for us to achieve our dreams, we can do it ourselves. Make those decisions and changes, be the change.

Hi my name is Joyce Pring. I am (turning) 20 years old, and because I’ve decided it, my time is now.