Stepping up to the plate?

There are times in everyone's life when they hope they will be able to step up to the plate and surprise themselves. One of those times is at your first try-out for a sports team, or for a part in a play, or for a big test. You might get nervous and prepare and fret, or you might just let it happen. Either way when the time comes for you to spike the ball, or hit the high note, you always hope you came that day to impress. As you get older these moments become rarer and rarer. They seem to carry more weight too. Now if you mess up, you might not get a scholarship, or you might be forced to quit or give up! You might even lower your GPA, or fail out! How you handle these situations may determine what you become later in life, and that right there, is very heavy. Growing up is tough. Once I placed all my faith into my parents. I could live a crazy personal life, but still reap the benefits of my parents' very normal, very put-together, very stable life. Now that I'm out on my own, all that is kaput, and I am left with myself, and all of my craziness. You can see the instant internal clash I would have with myself, wanting that stability and reliability, while only knowing how to be crazy. Welcome to the real world,I keep telling myself, and hello responsibility. The problem is though, how do I step up to this relentless, very big, and unforgiving plate we call maturity? I don't want to lose all the crazy, it is fun, but I don't want to be all crazy, that is putting me on the verge of depression from a lack of real things in my life. Alcohol is real, the place I go when I drink it however, is not. How do I prepare for maturity? Prepare to know when enough is enough, prepare to know when to go the extra mile? Where is the handbook for this one? I think the stork forgot to drop that one off with me when he left me on my parent's front porch.
The next hurdle is a doosey. Emotion and relationships. I didn't so much as receive a short briefing for these ones, let alone a handbook! Friends, dating, professional relationships; I need work. Here again lies my internal conflict of crazy vs. stable. How can I be friends with my fellow crazy's, and yet not think badly about them or myself? And a better question, how can I have any real fun with the reliable's?! This is my struggle, and this is why I think I have a lot of not too close friends; emphasis on the not too close. Everybody else has picked team. I am stuck playing the field. Offense and defense, and nobody likes a spy.
While I'm on the subject of pulling my life and life in general apart, where does honesty play into a normal person's life? Because, believe you me, I've always been one for honesty is the best policy, but it has lead me into deprecating situations, leading to my distrust of many things. A sarcastic goody-goody, crossed with a goal oriented crazy girl? What's that you say? Oh, insanity. Internal stress, and confusion? Hello.
This is one big plate, this massive thing called maturity, and responsibility, and stability. If you ask me, there are too many "ity" words on that plate, and the bar is raised way high in the sky, with a ladder that starts about 10 feet off the ground, and you have to find your way to it.