Tanvee Tirthapura

Little did I know that my days of blowing bubbles and frolicking in flowers were coming to an end.

When I was in third grade, I thought 16 was the age to be. At 16 you could drive, and that meant you were a real teenager. 

I am now 16.  But unfortunately, my fantasy of teenage life — where I would go on late-night drives, get perfect grades and develop some mysterious superpower destined to save the world — is nothing like the life I live today. Little did my 8-year-old self know that she would envy her seemingly mundane life, which was perfect in so many ways.

In 2017, I woke up each morning in time to catch the school bus to Fellows Elementary in Ames, Iowa, at precisely 7:12 a.m. in the morning. There I would spend the next 8 hours of my day. And that was it. No after-school club meetings or no practice, no weekend debate tournaments and, best of all, no homework. 

Now, I can barely get up at 8 a.m. to get to school. And once I come home, it’s all I can do to grind out physics problem sets, AP US History notes and newspaper stories. I’m writing this at 11 p.m. on a Saturday night.

In elementary school, though, my brilliance knew no bounds. I would fly through the problems my teacher put up on the board at lightning speed, waiting in saintly silence until someone else gave the wrong answer; at which point I would graciously offer up my impeccable arithmetic for adoration from the class. At one point, I had my times tables down so well that I could do 100 problems in less than a minute — though now it doesn’t impress my teachers the way it used to.

Today I’m lucky if I’m writing fast enough to copy down the lecture notes, let alone understand them well enough to pass the test. And, I think I’ve regressed in math — I need my calculator to know what six times seven is. 

In fourth grade, I was a weapon outside of school too. I practiced my violin (almost) every day, spent hours pouring over Singapore Math textbooks and Math Kangaroo practice tests, went swimming and practiced martial arts. I even took up competitive chess for a while, solving nearly every puzzle from “Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess” before I could sit in the front seat of the car.

While I still do extracurricular activities outside of school, they’ve become a lot more serious, demanding endless hours I just don’t have to give. What’s worse is the fact that sometimes I hardly even like the activities I’m doing, I’m just chasing perfection for the sake of “academic enrichment.” I get enough enrichment from my full-time job of being a high school student, thank you very much.

By far the best parts of my childhood were the days spent exploring secret worlds and building flying time machines with my best friends. Our afternoons were filled with playdates where we would obsessively watch the new season of “The Flash” or create painfully cringy iMovie trailers about our fascinatingly boring lives. 

On weekends, we built pillow forts and played night-time hide-and-seek in the shoulder-length grass outside my house. When the mosquitos and cold chased us inside, we would plead, cajole and threaten our parents into granting us yet another sleepover.

When I was little, everything felt new and exciting, as if the universe was made just for me. Like most kids, I thought I had everything figured out. With plan As and Bs and Cs for every possible outcome, I was determined to make the world bend at my touch. 

But things don’t always go according to plan. I never thought that my test scores would actually help the curve, or that I would want my bedtime to be before midnight or that I would actually miss being 8 years old.

And I know that when I’m 24 or 32, I will miss being 16.