When I was in elementary school, maybe in first or second grade, I remember happily skipping hand-in-hand with my dad the half-mile to school on an early November morning and taking a detour. Before dropping me off, we stopped at our neighborhood’s polling area in a nearby office building so he could vote.

I observed as he provided the necessary identification, and we were shuffled into one of the voting booths. I watched, my eyes barely high enough to peek over the table, as he filled in the tiny arrows next to the candidates and propositions he supported. Many of them were names I recognized from campaign signs that had been plastered on chain-link fences and stuck on my neighbor’s lawns for months now.

Though I had no concrete sense of what politics actually were at the time, I knew that voting was important. When my dad was finished they gave him a sticker! I only got stickers in class when I spelled words right on my vocabulary tests or finished another book in my reading log.

As we left the polling place, I asked my dad for the sticker and proudly stuck it to my shirt. I fielded a lot of questions that day from classmates who were curious to know which teacher was giving out American flag stickers, but I would smugly tell them I had voted. Inevitably some smart aleck exposed my lie, and I inadvertently ended up educating a lot of my classmates about the voting process. “You can’t vote until you’re 18, liar!” stuck with me for a while after that. I think I just ended up sticking that sticker on a binder with a bunch of smiley face ones.

As March is only a couple months away, I am nearing that revered 18th birthday which has prompted me to start closely following some local elections. Though I, along with most of my peers, was not be able to vote in this midterm election, I sincerely hope that they will join me in doing so in the future.

While midterms do not generally draw a lot of attention to younger and even older voters, mainly because there is decidedly less media coverage in comparison to the quadrennial presidential elections, local elections are a chance to initiate direct change within our own communities. This is a right that all American citizens should take advantage of, and as teens this is one of our first chances at civic engagement to have our new generation of ideas heard. We are an extremely lucrative demographic that truly can make a difference if we choose to wield our power.

I would be remiss to not implore my fellow women to follow suit as well. For all the struggles our gender faced in merely attempting to secure these rights, it is especially important that we do not do the suffragettes an injustice by wasting such a precious right.

So I urge everyone not to ignore all those political ads the next time you hear them on the radio or find them in the mail. Take the time to inform yourself about what issues are on the ballot; you might be surprised to see that you may hold many of the same personal beliefs as a candidate. It is possible you will find a particular proposition you strongly believe in or disagree with. No one should influence your decisions but yourself. Whether it be supporting a local candidate for school board or casting your vote for the next President of the United States, take the time to vote that first Tuesday of November in any even-numbered year.