Olga and Her Life List by Nicola

Olga and Her Life List by Nicola - April 2014 Scholarship Essay

Olga Gay Worontzoff is the brave, intelligent protagonist of Jamie Ayres’s debut novel, 18 Things. This is a book about living with guilt and learning to love, all while dealing with the constant pressure of high school. While Olga does not have the greatest name in the world, she does have some of the greatest character-building moments that I have ever read. Despite all of her doubts, she gained a faith in herself and her abilities that I envy.

Olga is an extremely relatable character. At the most basic level, she is a girl trying to survive high school, just like me. Despite a terrible tragedy that disrupts her junior year, she returns to Grand Haven High School to power through her senior year and defend her title of “probable valedictorian.” As someone who does spend a majority of her time studying, doing homework, and generally working hard to earn good grades, Olga’s story is similar to my own.

Throughout her senior year, Olga and her close friends are able to cross items off their “life lists,” bucket lists that could be completed before leaving for college. A lot of the things on Olga’s list could be considered trivial (“watching the top one-hundred movies of all time”), but the ones that stuck out to me the most are the ones about living life to the fullest. Simple goals (“start telling people what I really think”) can sometimes be the hardest to accomplish. Olga, with help from her friends, starts to realize that life is about more than school; life is about the relationships made and the maintenance they require.

I realized that, sometimes, I spend so much time doing assignments for school that I do not just relax and enjoy the company of my friends and family as much as I should. Each and every moment with my friends seems more precious to me now that I have read about Olga. If there is one point that this book really drives home, it is that life is too short to live with regrets and/or focused on the past. Like Olga, I have memories that I do not particularly cherish, but that does not mean that I am a bad person. Olga’s story is inspiring; she overcame the worst day of her life and turned it, slowly but surely, into a way of becoming the person that she was always capable of being.

When I was reading this book, I thought that it would be really awesome to make a life list of my own so that I could cross off items and feel accomplished. At first, I was thinking about listing a bunch of small things that would be easy to do (“read a book a day for a full week of summer”), but it started to dawn on me that I was missing the whole point of Olga’s story. To truly make a life list for my own senior year of high school, I would have to include some pretty major items (“get over my fear of being in the spotlight”). After reading all about Olga’s experiences, I might just be brave enough to give it a try. Now, I may never crash a wedding like Olga, but I hope that one day I can learn to love myself and others the way that she did.