I was always the kid who knew what they wanted to become.

First, it was simply a doctor, then a cardiologist, then a journalist (I predicted my future at the age of six, clearly), then a neuroscientist, then a journalist again.

And now that I’m getting the question more frequently, my answer is, “I don’t know.”

Entering my second semester of junior year, bluntly put, things are getting real. If you know what you want, the time is now to start on that track, and if not, you start to feel the walls close in; it doesn’t matter how many adults are telling you that you do not need to have it all figured out yet.

Many students who make it through junior year admonish underclassmen, telling of the impossibility of the work and the daunting nature of the start of the college process. I’ve seen it myself: every student comes in dreading their junior year. But from my experience, the workload is not what is getting to me, it’s the realization that I won’t be in high school for much longer.

I’ve always looked with excitement towards the college admissions process. I always had a dream school in mind, no matter how much of a reach I would consider it to be now. With parents who run an SAT prep company, the world of standardized testing and college admissions was not so much forced upon me as it was floating around me – it served to desensitize me to the process. I still can’t quite grasp that I’m already in my second semester of junior year.

When I took the SAT in December, I went in, ironically, with relatively little preparation. I tutored and such, but not seriously or for an extended period of time. I went in thinking, I got this; I know the test. I grew up around this. I’ve been waiting for this. But I found that I did not “know the test” as much as I thought I did, or should have. Instead, the reality of taking this pre-college test crept up on me, and it forced me to reflect on where I am. I realized that I had finally arrived at what always seemed like the mystical, faraway land of “Junior Year,” and I felt wildly unprepared to continue on.

I still feel unprepared. I doubt I’ll ever feel prepared to take on something that has always felt far away. Even in the short term, there never seems to be enough time to prepare for that difficult history test, or write that English essay, or sit down with that looming biology worksheet that has been staring at me from the myMFS assignments page for days. It all sneaks up on me. But more than the work is the sneaking realization that soon, I’ll be moving on. Not too soon, but soon enough to recognize that this feeling of stress, of impending decision, will become commonplace. I may not know where, or how, but in the span of weeks, I realized that change, welcome or not, is inescapable.

For those who have the infamous “Junior Year” workloads, extracurriculars, jobs, or extra responsibilities, it is not simply the commitments that lead to stress, but that these commitments indicate the inevitability of harder work and change in the future. The stigma around junior year, that it is miserable, draining, and by far the hardest year of high school, I find to be largely false. But, the realization of growing up, of leaving high school and making the leap, augments the depression that so many feel during their junior year. And the difficulty and amount of schoolwork doesn’t help.

Though I am not quite experiencing the effects of junior year that its stigma foretold, it certainly threw me into a headspace that I do not think I’ll ever be ready to truly grapple with: I am growing up, and I don’t quite know what I’m doing.