I look over each response three times. I call my mom to look over it. I keep it open for weeks before I have the confidence to hit the “Submit” button. All I can do is stare at the screen and hope and pray for my future to answer me.

I watch the clock as hours go by; that doesn’t work. I turn my concentration to the calendar as days and weeks go by. I check my email and mailbox religiously now, all for one slip of paper that hopefully begins “Congratulations…”

Like most students in their senior year, they’re playing the same game as me: trying to figure out their plans for after high school.

Since my freshman year of high school, I’ve kept a document on my computer to organize all of my college plans. I’ve color coded, venn diagrammed and organized and reorganized so many times that it’s just a mess now. I’ve spent hours upon hours on that document and reading articles and going through SuperMatch that I’m not even sure anymore of why I’m doing all this.

Why am I exerting myself so much? Why do I have four pages of notes from each college visit but no clue of how I rank my colleges? Why do I spend most weekends second-guessing my ACT scores and my extra-curricular activities list?

It’s been exhausting getting everything together, and for what? For the past three years of high school I’ve heard the words, “oh, you have time” and my favorite: “don’t worry about it.”

Don’t worry about it? How am I not supposed to? I don’t know where or how I’ll be living for the next four years of my life. It’s the transition stage between my childhood life and my adult life and I have nothing concrete to say about it.

I’ve never been great at “going with the flow,” if you can’t tell. My future needs to be my future, not in some letter or on some email. My future isn’t buried in my scores or my essays, it’s for me to discover on my own.