The Goal

For most of my life I have been a very sheltered child.  My family impressed upon me strong morals and innocent ideals, and the friends I surrounded myself with were almost as naïve as I was.  By the time I graduated, I had thought I had the world all figured out.  I had great grades and many honors, I was a role model for many of my younger friends, and I felt wonderfully happy and carefree about life.  How could people be unsatisfied or even depressed in such a beautiful world, I wondered?

And then I entered college.

In the first few weeks, I watched as the glistening world I had created for myself crumbled piece by piece, revealing the bare reality I had been hiding from.  Drugs, alcohol, sex, and a myriad of brand new swear words came hurtling toward me from all directions, and everyone around me accepted it as normality.  I felt as if I was alone in a glass box, watching my peers go about their lives but completely unable to join in for lack of understanding.

I ended first semester with one friend, a handful of acquaintances, and a whole lot of frustration and stress.  Something had to change.  So I laid out all of my morals and goals in front of me and set forth on a journey of self-reconstruction.

The Goal: to maintain the innocence and joy of a child, the knowledge and maturity of an adult, and the social graces of my own age group.

This is the story of my journey transitioning into adulthood and integrating into society without changing the core of who I am.  Join me, and together we can learn what it really means to become Wisely Naïve.