Ashleigh Heaton
Editor-in-Chief

On November 2, I became what you would call a “legal adult”. This, of course, led to me being bombarded with friends about things I can now legally do.

“You can vote! You can get married! You can buy stuff off of infomercials!”

While I haven’t done any of the above since I became legal (though I have had my eye on the Sham-wow for quite some time,) it is still empowering to know that I have those capabilities. Gone are the days when I was 14, constantly bumming rides from my parents and unable to watch Anchorman. Gone are the days when I was 16, when I could only drive with one friend in the car and had to be home before 11 p.m.

For the first time, I feel like I have control and freedom in my life. For the most part, I can do whatever makes me happiest and be independent in my own right, to take control of my life and strive for my dreams.

It kind of scares me.

I mean, Spiderman had that whole “with great power comes great responsibility” thing; even though the power of his spidey senses is a little bit different from the power of my newfound adult status, the message still rings true. Sure, I have all of these new freedoms, but that also means I have bigger consequences.

I’m not really afraid of going crazy with freedom and crossing any legal boundaries, but I am afraid of not making the right choices for myself. For example, I am absolutely terrified of managing my own money – something I now must legally do on my own. I nearly had a panic attack in economics when we started talking about stocks and bonds, investment and the like, thinking, “I’ll never be able to do this. Not a snowball’s chance in heck.”

Now that I have all this freedom, I feel more ignorant than ever – I don’t know everything. My age has opened me up to a whole slew of new insecurities, ones that will actually affect the rest of my life. College. Career. My future.

These were my initial thoughts on that November 2 day. But, after a month to let the idea settle in, I’m beginning to embrace the insecurity.

I have come to this conclusion: how are we to know what is going to happen tomorrow? Next month? Next year? We’re not. We can’t. But that is why this life is worth living, because we can be the masters of our very own destiny – legal or otherwise.

Whatever dreams or aspirations we have, we can strive for them. It is making the choices that get us there that is the hard part.

I have also realized that being independent does not mean being alone. Just because I can stand on my own two feet doesn’t mean I have to abandon all the dependences I have in my friends and family for support. So being 18 doesn’t mean we have to be completely self-sufficient – there’s still room for small dependencies.

In the meantime, maybe I should exercise my newfound freedom and finally get that Sham-wow. Who knows?