Congratulations! You’re going into your Senior year of high school. I know how you feel because I’m going into mine too. You’re ready to get the heck out of that school and go off to college, or the military if that’s how you’re rolling. But I think we need to get to the heart of things, here.
High school. We spent years romanticizing high school. We couldn’t wait to finally call ourselves high schoolers. Then we got half way through our freshman year and said “Get me out now”. We whined and complained through all the drama and made ourselves Starbucks addicts to keep us awake when studying for finals and the dreaded ACT/SAT testing(I don’t know about you guys, but my pockets were definitely emptied at Starbucks during testing). We watched jealously as the classes ahead of us graduated. We’ve been counting down the days we could say goodbye to the walls we loathed after seeing them 9 months out the year. But then something changed. We finished off the last final and said, “Hooray! We’re finally Seniors!” Then we realized, “Wait, I have less than a year to figure out my life.” Suddenly, we want everything and everyone to slow down. We don’t want to figure out our lives, we don’t want to leave all of our friends, we don’t want to see the halls, where millions of memories were made, go, and we certainly don’t want to say goodbye to moms homemade cooking when we leave for college.
I think this tells you exactly why Senior year is a mix of so many emotions. We want to get out of there, but we don’t want to figure out our lives. We want to leave behind all the drama, but we can’t say goodbye to all the friendships and memories made.
Every year I attend graduation for my school and I say, “I can’t wait for this to be me.” The truth is, though, I really can. While I do know what I want to do with my life and I’m ready to do it, I can’t bring myself to the last days of almost 12 years of my life and say goodbye to all my friends.