Once a VOXer, always a VOXer. Our series “Life After High School” features recent VOX ATL alums giving the teens coming up behind them the real deal on what life is like after graduation.

Life after high school, more commonly known as “life,” is equal parts exciting and terrifying. It feels great to operate on my own time and to do whatever I want, but then comes the questions of how my rent is going to get paid and how I can pay off my student loans or whether or not I can afford car insurance, let alone a car?

Writing this is somewhat difficult because I don’t really know what to say, just like I don’t really know what I’m doing in real life. I mean, I know where I’d like to end up, but the steps I take to get there can be clumsy and sometimes aren’t steps at all. But that doesn’t mean that I’m having a bad time necessarily, people weren’t lying when they told me that “it gets better” after high school, some things just got a bit more confusing too. And while I am unsure of most things these days, my self-confidence is the strongest it’s ever been, in what I can only attribute to maturation and my desire to exist as a functioning adult.

But even though I’ve been out of high school for almost two years now, I’m still adjusting to this more confident version of myself and how it’s changed the way people interact with me. I honestly believe that I’ve changed more in the past year and a half than I did during my junior and senior years. I think the best way to sum up where I am in life is with a quote from Charles Dickens, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”

Kenneth Franklin is a VOX ATL alum and 2018 graduate of Druid Hills High School. He is currently attending Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU), majoring in cinema and mass communications.