This year my niece graduates from middle school.

I don’t remember graduating from middle school. I remember middle school being where I began using humor as a self-defense mechanism, discovered that boys could be deliciously mysterious and brooding or painfully original (girls much the same) and I remember being tossed about like a stray sock in a clothes dryer and then dumped on the front lawn of high school – where a whole new education in social behavior would begin.

But I digress…

She’s graduating and she’s excited and she was even way more excited when I told her a little graduation gift would be waiting for her afterward.

Maybe it’s not the most monumental of moments in life … still I sit … trying to come up with some wisdom to impart on her as she gets ready to start a new school with new challenges, growing up some more, making some more mistakes, learning some more realities.

I would like to impart some wisdom on her.

I want to but really, today, there is not much wisdom in my brain. There is only a vast black bit of nothingness that wants to get lost in the fact that “Sex and the City 2” will soon be in theaters, giving me a little delight to live vicariously through the Manolo Blahniks of such lovable characters.

Yes, my brain and all of the emotion that I would normally muster up seems to have been sucked out by two very trying weeks and a lot of other crap that piles up in the corners of the mind and the heart and the soul pretty much as all crap does.

I want to tell her how important it is to indulge in the words of William Shakespeare, Jane Austen and Ernest Hemingway.

I want to explain to her that as she takes on the social pressures of high school to remember that the people who meet you in the halls and sit next to you in those dreaded chair-desk combos are just people.

In four years they will be on the verge of uncertainty just as you are. They’ll make mistakes and find their own sense of self-consciousness, even if they’re trying to get at your own sometime between lunch and fourth period.

I want to tell her there is a life lesson in those kids who you sometimes see alone. Eating at a desolate lunch table or walking home without a friend to chat with. The life lesson is this: a flip of the coin and someone so easily ridiculed could be you. So be the filler of the void.

I’d like to tell her all these things but the arm on my glasses broke yesterday morning on an impossibly stress-filled day and I kept having to try and keep my glasses together all day. And it annoyed my quite severely – as one might imagine.

Quite frankly, I’m not interested in Austen or Shakespeare right now. I’d take a good story that doesn’t require much thinking. Or a trashy tabloid magazine, to tell you the truth.

And all I really want is my French press and my fresh ground coffee and my couch and an incredibly cold apartment and maybe some other guilty pleasures like episode after episode of Grey’s Anatomy or Alias on DVD.

Or ice cream. A lot of it.

I don’t want to be wise or wondery or think about what to say to whom, what not to say to others or what should be said to someone else.

On days like these, I like to indulge. Fill my ears with epically morose music.Take my brain someplace far away, someplace I haven’t written yet.

People say not to give in to days like these. They pile up on you with positive thinking and pep talks and tell you not to give in to the days that get a little cloudy even when the sun is beating down at 88 degrees.

But I say, give it a minute. Give those days that just beat you down to your knees a moment or two to soak in. Recoil, retreat and recover.

And as an aunt who can still remember her niece’s little 5-year-old hands all pruney from her bath settled in the palms of my hands, soft pajamas that smelled like soap, hair still wet – I think that’s some wisdom.
Moving into the chapter of high school there will be days that just sneak up on you, test your resolve and make you wish you’d stayed inside.

Days that you’ll want to shrink away from and not return to the next morning.

Right now, as a matter of fact, it is quite the accomplishment my niece has achieved.

And when she takes part in her graduation ceremony, I hope her heart flutters with excitement and a little anticipation for whatever comes next. Even if that is just summer vacation.

Long after the middle school and high school chapters are over, there will be moments when it all feels a little stacked against you. Like a pop quiz on a day you didn’t get any sleep.

Give yourself those little indulgences to get through. Those bits and pieces that make you who you are. Be a coffee snob, dream about being a flawless super surgeon or a super secret CIA agent, get lost in the magazine racks, curl up with the remote and a soft blanket.

Give yourselves just a little time to feel the tough parts. The parts that break your heart. That tear you up.

Really feel it.

Then re-emerge.

And go at it all again.

Jessica Sieff reports for the Niles Daily Star and Edwardsburg Argus. E-mail her at jessica.sieff@leaderpub.com.