Bailey Powell's Crusin' Life
By Caleb Garetson
Bailey Powell sat in her car with the driver's seat reclined flat enough to be a bed as large blankets sprawled and stretched out amongs loose nicknacks thrown here and there. I got in, and then we drove off. Much like on that drive, Bailey doesn't know where she will end up after high school. College is a shrug-maybe at best, and a large campus with crowds of students mixed in together is not on the long road ahead for her since, as she said, "I'll never be able to go to a big school, I'd just get lost in the sauce."
The first stop turned out to be coffee. Bailey pulled around the drive-thru and handed the window a tiny layer of cash. Then she abruptly exclaimed, "How am I gonna pay for college, with my 34 dollars?" We continued discussing living with student debt throughout your 20s (and possibly beyond) as a poor life strategy. Especially when you're in Bailey's position, having no real clue where you want to take life. However, she's got a work ethic (having multiple jobs of experience), and she knows she will make it somehow, and I have no doubt about it.
She reflected on these past four years as she drove, wandering the icy Ohio roads while buildings and sparse patches of trees blurred in and out of view. The many mistakes and regrets made along the way were made because she's been "stuck for too long with too many people," people that push you into bad situations, people that use and abuse you for their gain. Types of people that most high schoolers have in their life in some form or another. Bailey advises removing these people: "It's okay to make sacrifices for yourself." She reflected on how, during high school, there was a struggle to let people go, a fear of disappointing or being disliked by others, and doing everything she could to make others happy, even at the sacrifice of her own. She knows now that "it's okay to be the only one that likes you."
She pulled into a favorite spot of hers, the park. We sat in the car, staring at all the trees with frozen leaves and puddles dotted around their trunks. The music was turned off. After some time in silence, other than the car engine rumbling, she said, "I don't realize how big the world is." then, in a quiet tone with a somber inflection, she went in depth about all the built-up anxiety of graduation, of leaving everything she has known and lived with and having to figure things out on her own with no road map. "I'm not ready to be an adult," yet we have to, and that's how it is.
We drive on the road of life, never seeing the cracks, potholes, and bends ahead. We don't know if there is a rest stop or when we'll run out of gas, but outside the window, trees and grass are swaying with the wind; the scenery is beautiful, and just living is enough to do, in fact, that, 's all there is to do. At least, that is all Bailey Powell plans to do.