I do not look back fondly on my high school years. Not that I didn’t get to know some good people and enrich my life with “interesting” experiences, but overall, I hated high school. By the time I’d finished 9th grade, I considered high school to be nothing but a mandatory prison sentence that had to be served before being permitted to become part of society.
I know there are several people in the high school demographic who check in on this blog, and I suspect some of you feel the same way. So I thought I would share with you two thoughts about high school.
Number One: High school is about being the same, but college is about being yourself. You will not always be judged by how your clothes or vacation destination or speech pattern stacks up to others – that is, unless you want to be judged that way. If that’s what works for you, great. But for the rest of us, we move on. College is a time to get to know ourselves, discover that interesting people aren’t all alike and that our friends like us for those differences. High school does not reflect real life.
Number Two: If high school is the pinnacle of your life, what do you have to look forward to? This thought struck me my senior year. Watching my classmates, I realized that for some, these were their glory days. Their lives would never reach higher or be more exciting or fulfilling than they were at that moment. I felt sad for them and counted myself among the lucky. The best days of my life were still to come, and were not just a handful of memories that no one else would remember even a year later.
These thoughts changed nothing for me. I was still the kinda dorky girl who almost fit in lots of circles but didn’t really fit in anywhere. I still wasn’t invited to the parties I would hear about all week at school. I still had some teachers who loved me or hated me without a lot of reason behind either. But it no longer mattered so much. My life was ahead of me. And high school? Well, it was just stupid.
For me, grade school was the pinnicle of my career. I had recess, sand boxes and my mittens clamped on my sleeves.