Sixteen was more fun at five.

I'm going to be turning seventeen in a little over a month. Last year when I turned sixteen I wrote a journal entry a little similar to my thought processes for this one, because birthdays are definitely a time of consideration and reflection, even if the conclusions you find aren't exactly what you're hoping for.

When I was little, before I started going to school and I had time to spend all my days playing under the bright sunshine, I had a best friend named Becky that I spent every moment with. And our favorite thing to ever do was play pretend. We would pretend we were big exotic cats living at the zoo, then we would fill up bowls of cereal to pretend that was our food bowl (Yeah, big cats with a food bowl. Give me a break. We were kids.), then we'd crawl around the house and gab like a couple of housewives from our "cages" to each other. Or maybe we were princesses running away from some evil bad guy trying to kidnap and marry us, so we went undercover to some high school in America. Or we were spies- never really sure who we worked for or what we were trying to accomplish, but we were just cool like that. We'd string up my room with yarn and perform "incredible acrobatic feats" in order to reach the far corner of the room from the door, retrieve the magic crown, and escape without setting off the alarms. Or, as it seemed to be our personal favorite, we were a couple of sixteen year old girls in high school, the coolest, hottest, most awesome girls ever that everyone wanted to be friends with and all the guys loved and got perfect grades all the time. We had incredible cars far beyond the reach of any regular teenager, and our boyfriends were naturally incredible looking Ken-dolls of guys, until, of course, someone better looking came along and swept us off our feet, then we swept them off their feet by showing off our secret super powers which nobody knew about yet we seemed to find handy all the time.

And that was the life I wanted.

Thinking back to those years, I had no concept of profound, deep thought. I didn't know about any higher meaning to life other than the Sunday school answers that had been injected into my veins which I never really understood for years and years, nor did I really care. I thought life was all about being pretty, and popular, and rich. I'm horrified with myself back then, and if I felt the same way now, I don't know that I could live with myself. And yet, isn't this exactly what the media and everything we are surrounded by as children teaches us to think? We thought superficial, useless things were life because that is exactly what we were told to think. We were gifted Barbies and Polly Pocket and Melanie's Mall because that's what we wanted, and that's what we wanted because it's what every little girl ever was given. These were our role-models, and oh how we adored them. I speak of how terribly shallow all of this was, and yet, to avoid being hypocritical, I will confess that an inkling of that thought process still lives in some deep dark corner of my mind. I still want to be pretty and popular and rich because, let's face it, even though I know those things don't make a person happy, it's damn hard to look around the world these days and really believe that.

Luckily, I grew up. I had no friends for a long period of time in elementary school, so most of my influences came from my family, and I thank God for that. Those times I would sit in the lunch room all alone and gaze at all the pretty, popular sixth grade girls and want- to the point that it hurt sometimes- to be them when I got older. But I was far from on the road to becoming one. I didn't have the typical girlfriends that would sit and gab about hair and starting to wear makeup and that cute boy across the classroom. Instead, I feasted on the video games and books and complete oddity that was poured into the crucible of my young mind by my family. Then I met Rachael and Lauren in the fifth and sixth grade, and everything changed. I didn't need the shallow prettiness and popularity anymore, because I had someone who accepted and loved me, far more than those other girls ever had. And that was enough. In fact, it was more than enough- it was more than I had ever wanted, more than I had ever realized I could want. I began to find myself then, and realize that I would never let myself want to be the pretty, popular one again. I wanted to be much more than that. I wanted to be completely different, the one that people would look back and remember as something out of no where that they had never seen anything like.

Then in the seventh grade, I began tinkering with Photoshop and graphic design, and it seems as though the entire purpose to my existence came to life. I realized then that art was a burning passion in my soul, and no matter how long I live or where my life takes me, art will be my solace, best friend, and lover. R.A. Salvatore once said in an interview, "If you can quit, then quit, and if you can't quit, you're a writer. You don't write to get published or to get rich and famous (because few writers get published and a tiny speck of a percentage become rich and an even tinier speck of a percentage become famous). You write because you have stories clawing at the inside of your skin, desperately trying to tear free." I think that very well applies to the way I feel about art. My soul is a big, scary monster made of art, and it claws at me just trying to get out. There have been nights that despite being dead tired, I have stayed up six hours later because there is a piece of art that I absolutely must bring to life before I can rest. I have devoted more hours to my arts than I dare to say, and this not because I assume I have some sort of future in it, even though that would be the greatest thing I could ever dream of, it is because I MUST. Without my art, I am an empty husk without anything to drive me forward. It is the engine that keeps my being going.

This said, I truly became myself as I discovered my passion in life and what real friendship and love were. Since then it seems I have completely devoted myself to these things- art, family, and the friends who showed me truth. Looking back on what I wanted from my sixteen year old self, my life is absolutely nothing like what I could have imagined. But you know what? It's real. And I absolutely love my life, because it's the only one I've got. I'm not the pretty, popular, rich one at school, but I'm also not the one who cries herself to sleep at night because no one knows who she really is. There's certainly a lot more that I could hope for from myself; I wish that I was a better friend, I wish that I was a better sister and daughter, I wish that I was a better artist and had more time to devote to my art, and I wish that I had more patience and devotion to give to my spirituality. But I'm trying really hard, and I guess all I can really do is be satisfied with that.

So here's to seventeen. :)