the end is in sight

Is this it? The end of (let's see...)almost 18 years of education (including kindergarten). I still feel a bit stunned. Wow almost 20 years of being inside school systems, I'm soon to be ejected out into another social system. How did it happen? How did all that time pass me by? I still remember feeling damn scared being shoved onto my first school bus, all that mess with vomits, untimely bodily discharges from the digestive system. How other children were scary but not as frightening as the towering giant of a teacher I had. Education was traumatic, how did we all stay so sane even after so many years.. Maybe we're not that sane, but oh well..it's never too late to turn hermit now.

All our life being governed by school terms. Hah, no seasons in Singapore, so we understand time via school terms. CA, SA, June holidays, December Holidays. tests, Periods, Bell rings, Recess. CCAs, homework. assemblies, national athems, school songs. Hanging out. Did I come a long way or am I still where I started off? I wonder if I have really been thoroughly changed by things I have learnt from the education system. Because part of me still feels like that really scared, small girl first day of school. Always trying to find my way around. Fumble about and manage to stay afloat with all the others thrown into the same ocean, learning the rules, finding ways to break them. Having guilty pleasures at the expense of some one else. that cruel stage called teen-hood. Some changes come upon unnoticed, like how new shoots bud from seeds always when you least expect, catching you unaware. How I see someone just like myself in secondary school and wonder when did I become someone else, but it's strange how some parts of me still stays the same, only I don't know which is which.

I know, I've always talked about anxiety of starting work, of 'supposedly' entering another phase in life, but I wonder if I am wrong. Maybe things aren't going to be that different. maybe I'll still be that same small girl first day of school, over and over and over again. And there's also that freedom, of putting on versions of yourself, picking one out from a pile. There are the secretive, sociable, private, mean, confident, self-conscious sides, there's so many, and having to put them together from that palette when changes come upon us, is scary, but it is probably one of those moments when we also feel an incredible freedom. Even if it is an illusion, that we can remake ourselves. that there are things anew. Even if the tree stays the same, the leaves are new, the blossoms are new, the insects residing are new, the rain it catches is new. And there is that freedom which accompanies that fear, like free falling, like sky diving, like living. And I want to appraoch both with eyes and arms wide open.