24
Honing In
What does it mean to find your place?
By Lorelai Finoch Central Focus Editor-in-Chief
As we reach the second quarter of the year, the majority of college applications have started rolling out, and with them arises my entirely contradictory but ever-constant fear of planning for the future. The idea of moving on from here, from this monotonous day-to-day has always been an appealing daydream, one that’s pushed me to look past the immediate future and consider the many places I want to go. However, in reality, this examination of how my life could be has always been so unattainable. So colossal. So, simply put, scary. To combat this, making fairly well-structured plans has been the key to my typically elusive motivation for years, as the fear of imminent deadlines and immovable appointments is all that really keeps me going when I’m running strictly on fumes, as I know is largely the case for many of my peers (a problem that none of us outwardly address, that only grows more outrageous). But laying the foundation for the next four years of my life has been stressful, to say the least, and if I may go a step further, absolutely migraine-inducing. There have been few times in my life where I was sure of who I was and what I wanted. This isn’t a surprise, by any means. I’m a teenager. A child. I don’t know what I’m going to be doing a month from now, let alone five years, so how could I really understand where I’m going? How could any of us, who’ve barely seen the outside of our hometowns? But even when I think I have an idea, the slightest inkling, of whatever it is that I might be looking towards, there’s always been
something missing. That something has varied from activity to activity, but it all sums up to one thing: it’s all right that I don’t particularly excel in these areas, but I’m not motivated to try to be better, either. Because of this, I always felt out of place, like the people around me were always a step ahead. Like I wasn’t as good as I should’ve been. Then, at the beginning of my junior year, coming off of over a year of social distancing and virtual learning, I found myself a staff reporter in room 139. I was terrified. I didn’t know what I was going to do, how I was going to do it. I was lost and there was no foreseeable way for me to manage it. Then I got my first assignment. I wrote my interview questions, my rough draft, I got my first edits, and then it was finished. I had spent the previous year working with a virtual staff made up of students from Howell, North, and Central, but none of it was ever published. Nobody knew where it was supposed to go. But now, I