Premature Nostalgia

Looking for Alaska, The Perks of being a Wallflower, Paper Towns.

I don't read a lot of real-world YA novels, preferring the foreign lands of high fantasy, but anytime I read this sort of book I get a strange sense of nostalgia and foreboding. It's nostalgia for my lost teenage years that I'll never again get back as well as foreboding for the regret I fear I'll feel in ten years for wasting my youth studying.

The thing is, I'm sixteen years old and the characters in these books are roughly my age but I can't seem to relate my own life to them at all. I'm consumed by exams and study stress whereas their lives are full of excitement and adventure. These books are full of teens who run away from home, go to indie music concerts, road-trips, play pranks, smoke, date, do drugs and generally just enjoy life. I realise that these are such stereotypical teenage things to do and that smoking and doing drugs are not advisable ways to live but there is still a yearning inside of me to live the life of a criminal and a vandal. These kids live their lives with very little regard for the rest of the world, they have fun and they make memories with the people they love. I don't feel like I have done any of these things that I have so far listed.

I've never disobeyed my parents (at least in nothing bigger than staying up half the night online when I was told to go to bed), I've never been to any kind of concert, I'm too young to drive, the biggest prank I pulled was on April first when I was ten and stuffed my bed so it looked like I was still asleep, I hate the smell of tobacco smoke, I go to an all-girls school and only have a casual acquaintance with a few male beings and I have never tried drugs. I constantly feel like I'm not achieving anything with my life and tell myself that when I finish school my life will begin but in my heart I know that it already has and I'm just not doing anything with it.

I suppose this is why I get such a peculiar feeling when I read books by John Green and Stephen Chbosky. It's a feeling of longing to go out and live a crazy life with my friends and forget for a few hours what the consequences might be. And I suppose this is partly the Gryffindor within me that wants to let my hair flow in the wind as I ride through the glen, firing arrows into the sunset. But hey, anything is possible if you have confidence and a focused mind right? (I'm adopting that as my life motto now.)

So maybe I'm wasting my youth and maybe I'll regret it in the future. But how can I know I wouldn't regret it more if I skipped school and failed my exams? Maybe it's not possible to live a life free of regretful things and maybe we should all try to be Zen. Or maybe we just wish for a life more exciting than our own because we can never be satisfied with the one we have.