A fire alarm? A dying elephant!? Nope, it’s just my laugh.

In third grade, I was asked to leave my classroom and to return only when I had ended my laugh attack and regained composure. In a fifth grade science class, I accidentally cut my finger during a dissection because I was laughing too hard. As an eighth grader, I made my baby cousin start crying whenever I laughed.

Although my laugh has caused more problems than pleasure over the years, it hasn’t gotten any less weird throughout high school. My exasperated friends roll their eyes once they hear the initial giggle that indicates an imminent explosion, and a few of my teachers insist that they can hear me laughing from across campus.

Those of you who don’t know me probably think I’m an obnoxious lunatic by now due to my lack of restraint, but I did used to be uncomfortably self-conscious about my highly unflattering laugh. And although I haven’t been able to alter it one bit, I have abandoned all efforts to hide it. My superficial justification is the common idea that “laughing makes us live longer”; but in all honesty, I just think it’s fun.

According to the Association for Applied and Therapeutic Humor, small children laugh more than 300 times a day, while the same statistic for adults is a mere 17. As my final weeks of legal childhood approach, I have resolved that I don’t want to completely succumb to this unfortunate downward trend.

Laughter leaves in us a sense of wonderment. As we let the endorphins dominate our senses, we release all our inhibitions and lift our veils of judgement and constraint for just a moment to open our eyes to the spontaneity in life.

Sigmund Freud’s theory of laughter as a coping mechanism or Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy that laughter is evidence of existentialist mortality may be completely substantiated; however, I prefer to believe that laughter simply bridges the gap of the unknown and allows us to form new connections. As Victor Borge said, “Laughter is the shortest distance between two people.”

A year from now, I’m not going to remember the math test for which I spent hours studying or the outfit that I planned for today; instead, I will remember sitting with my friends at lunch and laughing uncontrollably over a lame joke. The lasting memories will be the ones that occurred unplanned and unexpected–but more than welcome. And that’s what laughter is.