I have a headache.
To be honest, I wholeheartedly believe that March was built to be an academic nightmare. March comes with the end of trimester two and the chaotic completion of another season in the year (which means the ending of sports seasons and the closing night of the winter show).
I would say march madness would be something of an understatement that could be used to describe this month. Madness and chaos may be synonymous, but there’s something about the aggression behind the term “chaos” that fits this month much better.
The beginning of March will never fail to give me a headache. The weather is warming too fast to be comfortable, the schoolwork is stacked up from each class as teachers finalize trimester grades and write comments and the stress is suddenly on again more than ever, but not for a tangible reason.
Diving deep, I think I may have narrowed it down to the culmination of school as a concept, the fast approach of the future and the step closer one has to take to that scary thing we like to call “adulting.”
Maybe the step isn’t fully present, but the sentiment is there, and the sentiment is scary.
Spring's message of “new beginnings” doesn’t hold much comfort when you’re a teenager staring at the future like it’s something that betrayed you before you even held its hand, and the sudden onslaught of warm sun is just the ever-present reminder that you have to grow up just a little more.
I wholeheartedly believe that it’s mostly optimists who enjoy spring. The sun makes it hard to complain about the dimness and the warmth makes it hard to find something to be unhappy about.
But maybe March is just a nightmare to the stodgy realists of the world: the ones without that vivacious conviction pumped with ideals, the ones who didn’t hide broken crayons at the back of their desks or tore through colored pencils by coloring in the sky a little too hard. March may be that violent force that says, “Things are going to begin to change again all around you, and you’ll be forced to watch it happen.”
Maybe the best way to deal with the onslaught of academics and march madness is just to take a breather (and an Advil), and watch it pass. Maybe it’s something like walking on the sidewalk next to an ongoing parade. never as fast as it but not slow enough as to fall far behind. Maybe that’s just a long explanation of what growth is — if so, maybe not all growth is conscious.
I will accept it with a tablet of Aleve, and March will come and go, and it’ll be like getting off a rollercoaster. Or getting onto one, depending on how the whole idea of “planning for the future” goes. Realists hate March — but maybe not as much as they think.