“What colleges are you applying to?”
“What are your extracurriculars?”
I’ve heard such questions countless times in the last few months. College app season has pushed me, and practically every other senior, into a whirlwind of self-doubt and overthinking. Oftentimes, it either feels like I’m not doing enough, or that I’m doing too much. Amidst the blur of balancing school, work, extracurriculars and college applications, I’ve been struggling to put enough weight on different aspects of my life because everything feels like it matters so much.
What I’ve come to realize is that most things do not, in fact, matter. Not the assignment I forgot to do. Not the dance practice I messed up during. And definitely not the embarrassingly vulgar rap music that suddenly blasted in my silent AP Lang classroom when my AirPods disconnected.
We are literally living on a rock. A giant rock housing a bunch of tiny things that happen to be breathing, eating and moving because of this crazy thing called life. This giant rock is twirling around with a bunch of its fellow giant rock friends. There is an unfathomable amount of giant rocks scattered and spinning across the abyss of space. And we’re one of the tiniest of them, even though the rock seems enormous from our perspective. On this tiny, tiny rock, we are one of a trillion living things.
We are nothing but monkeys with alopecia—half bald monkeys.
We are nothing. We are just silly little bald monkeys who, for some strange reason, decided to make this complicated system of living in order to be a part of monkey society. We need to work a job in order to receive some processed leaf called money and we have to use that to pay for shelter and food. What is money, really? What is time? What are we?
I was at the Travis Scott concert the other day. If there’s one thing that Travis Scott fans can do, it’s mosh. As I jumped around to Sicko Mode, the half bald monkey, floating rock realization hit me. We are all literally monkeys jumping around animalistically while another monkey screams into a mic. We put this monkey on a pedestal because he can sing and jump around a stage for two hours. And we’re all bonding because we love this monkey. We’re all in this room which seems so giant to us but it’s actually just the tiniest speck on an inconsequential floating rock.
It’s honestly kind of wholesome. The world seems all that much more beautiful when you just take a step back and humble yourself. We’re just creatures. We give each other hugs and gifts, we show our teeth when we’re happy and put our hands over our face when we feel embarrassed. We eat meals together, learn together and talk to each other. We’re kinda cute. With this realization, my senior stresses began to feel much lighter.
To all my fellow seniors, from one college app monkey to another, it’s not that deep.
