Closed for the Year

For most people nightmares include running, screaming, free-falling, despair, darkness, death, etc. As they sleep, people imagine themselves in the most terrifying scenarios that arouse fear and anxiety. For the past year, my nightmares have been a little different. Rather than monsters, I saw three red numbers: 1:45, 2:26, 3:43, 4:07. And I was never asleep during such nightmares. The problem was that I was awake, usually past two o’clock and sometimes for the entire night.

I am seventeen years old and about to enter my senior year of high school. The late nights were part of the junior year experience at my school. I took five Advanced Placement (college level) classes, ran the peer mentoring program and attended meetings every Sunday, edited and contributed writing to a nationally-recognized literary magazine, kept track of members of the environmental club, took an introductory language class, attended tutoring or meetings after school nearly every day, exercised (by running around after school when organizing multiple events at the same time or flailing my arms while trying to explain an important topic), took the SAT twice, took four SAT subject tests, took the ACT once, attended one funeral for a childhood friend, contracted a mysterious illness, saw three different doctors, had my blood drawn five times in three months, ate irregular meals, and slept on occasion.

For most of the year I was rather busy. Every minute of my life was packed with something that seemed urgent. My mother even said that my life had become more difficult than hers during her medical residency, when every mistake could spell death and shifts were generally ten hours long at odd times during the day. The seemingly unimportant things like sleep, friends, and peace of mind slipped by. For most of the year I just thought I needed to work until my AP tests were over in mid-May, but I was wrong. Until mid-June I was bombarded with projects. Immediately after I spent a week at a literary magazine workshop, then I started an internship at a bioinformatics lab at a local university. As I adjusted to the nine to five work schedule, something changed. I felt as if the whole year had been a volcanic eruption and the lava was just beginning to cool. My life was no longer running madly in a variety of directions—it had frozen.

For the longest time I thought I had lost my mind. I don’t mean to say that I went insane (although it’s entirely possible), but I lost the ability to think freely. I can now actually think about the events that took place in the past year, ponder over how to mend my friendships and how to regain the morals I seemed to forget about amidst the assignments and assessments.

The way I define freedom it can’t be taken away by a tyrant, parents, an oppressive husband, a teacher, or a judge. No matter how many times I felt inferior, such as when I failed an assignment or was told that I should be doing better, I never felt like my freedom was taken away. My freedom to think, to let ideas stew in my brain, only seemed to escape me when I reached an interesting passage in a book and had to skim it rather than fully analyze it. I felt devoid of freedom when let a friendship fall between the cracks because I didn’t have the time to worry about it. I felt caged when I read about a past president but didn’t think about the kind of man he was or how to learn from the mistakes he made.

When I look at a digital clock, even when I wake up at three o’clock, I feel free from the red numbers that used to haunt me at night. I’m no longer trapped within the little red boxes or between the straight red lines. Finally, I can stare at the contraption for an hour and let my mind travel to all of the exciting places that had been closed for the past year.