Sometimes, life can really suck. When you’re a kid, responsibility is for adults, and even though you so desperately want to be able to stay out late or make your own decisions about where you go and what you do, you don’t really understand that you can’t have the good times without the bad. The first time that this revelation hit me, I panicked. I wanted to run away from responsibility and never look back. I would have given anything to be a little kid again – to live in blissful ignorance of how the world really worked. I thought if I just wished hard enough, that I would wake up the next morning in my bunk bed with my mom trying to rush me to get ready for school, the biggest thing on my mind being how I would annoy the girl in my class that I liked.

To most little kids, life is like a journey. Every week you can change your mind and decide you don’t want to be an astronaut anymore because you’ve decided that a career in race car driving would be more fun. People tell you that it’s okay, because you can grow up to be anything you want to be, and it’s true – just think about president Obama and the kind of life he had growing up. Some kids start to figure out what they want to do with their life in high school, and by the time they get to college they’ve got a major picked out. Sure, they may change majors a couple times, but it’s usually something else they just didn’t know they were interested in.

Then there are kids like me. Since the 4th grade, I wanted to be a musician. Even if I hardly ever practiced, playing cello was the one thing that could really make me happy. Throughout middle school and the beginnings of high school, I picked up new instruments left and right. Some people told me I had a natural talent for stringed instruments, and I could think of nothing more than playing music for the rest of my life.

Then I discovered how wonderful a resource the Internet could be, and I would spend hours every day reading about all sorts of things and learning as much as I could about the world around me. All of these things that I read and learned about were new and exciting to me, and I wasn’t quite sure that I wanted to be a musician anymore.

Every day now, I grow further and further from knowing what I want to do with my life. It’s not that I can’t find anything I’m interested in or don’t have the opportunity to explore. The truth is, I want to do it all. I want to travel the world learning how languages work. I can think of nothing better than exploring the depths of the ocean or discovering new life on Mars. This is how it hit me.

The first time I really thought hard about things and how I couldn’t truly be a Renaissance Man in this day and age was the first time I felt truly insignificant in the grand scheme of things. I’m talking just-been-thrown-into-the-Total-Perspective-Vortex from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy insignificant. I (an 18 year old boy at the time) called my mother, and at the points in time when I could stop crying enough to talk intelligibly, asked her to tell me that everything was going to be okay, and then talked to my dad for a few minutes before I felt a little better. I usually don’t think about talking to my dad in emotional situations, because my experience with guys has been that they’ll listen to your stories, but usually can’t offer much in the way of advice.

Later that day, I got a text message from my dad that changed my life. It told me exactly what I needed to hear at the time to know that everything was going to be okay. I thought about his life and about how when his old bosses wanted him to change jobs to something he had no interest in doing, he decided it was time for something new. I realized that even if I end up not enjoying a job as much as I’d like to, there will always be a time when I can say, “I’m ready for a change.”

Now when the bad days come, I just try to remember that life can really suck sometimes, but it’s just a part of growing up. My dad showed me what they don’t tell little kids – that once you do finally pick something, you don’t necessarily have to stick with it for the rest of your life if you just can’t do it anymore, and that’s okay too.

Thank you dad. I may not like to say this (cause it’s not very manly), but I love you.

Everybody knows
It sucks to grow up
And everybody does
It’s so weird to be back here.
Let me tell you what
The years go on and
We’re still fighting it, we’re still fighting it

Ben Folds – Still Fighting It