Looking Back at the Many Years of a School Life

High School takes up 720 days of our lives. 720 days of sitting at desks with people you probably won’t talk to outside of class. 720 days of waking up early with the intention of actually getting ready but then hitting the snooze button so you can sleep in with just enough time to through on a sweatshirt and some pants and saying “eh good enough”. 720 days of telling yourself that class is only 5 ten minute increments and you can do anything for ten minutes. 720 days may seem like a long time. You can meet your best friends that may be a lifelong friends or friends you’ll lose at the end of the month. You can make insane memories that you will tell you kids. And you’ll even meet people who like to make fun of you or judge you even though they don’t know your situation or who you really are. In those four years you can establish who you are and who you want or may not want to be.

You have time to make mistakes, because mistakes make the best stories and lessons. There is time for late nights blasting music as loud as you can while jamming out with your friends. And getting McDonalds at midnight with your best friend after prom or staying up till three am to finish a tv show series that you told yourself only one more episode at 10pm just because you can. It’s time to be over stressed and overwhelmed and cry. You’ll probably cry more within these 720 days than you ever will again. 720 days to fit so much in your life. So many important milestones, in what seems like forever.

But then one day you blink and it’s gone. You're not 16 anymore. You’re walking across this stage looking at the people you have surrounded yourself for the past 4 years and you probably still don’t know half of their names. The teacher who taught the class you hated is congratulating you for making it out alive. You have come to realize that no, it's not like the movies. It's so much more but so much less.

When I was five I got asked what I wanted to be when I grew up along with all the other kids in my class. Our answer were things like a police officer, the president, or in my case a Disney princess. As our teachers have asked us for the past 12 years our answers always changed but now that we are all grown up they want a serious answer of what we want to be and who we are. Now who are we? That is a great question. We've spent the last 12 years of our lives trying to prepare for that, but it isn't something that you can Google. Well, you can Google it, but make sure that you turn on the safe search first. There is no telling what your results might be.However, Google won't tell us where our passion lies. It won't tell us who we are. And while some of us know, (your parents are breathing a deep sigh of relief right now), others of us don't. We still don't know what we want to be when we grow up yet, and that is okay. Well, your parents might not think so when you are on your fourth major and they're paying your tuition, but it is still okay. I know it’s a cliche it’s true, but high school does really fly by. The days are long,sometimes really, really long but it flies by. I’ve spent these past four years under the impression that high school is a never ending adventure, because that’s exactly how it feels.

But i’m realizing now that I was wrong. It ends. But I wish that someone had warned me that oddly enough saying goodbye to your best friends isn’t the hardest part, because let’s be honest it’s not goodbye, not yet anyway. The hardest part is coming to terms with the fact that you will never see that kid with the glasses you pass everyday on your way to math again, that all the people that you never talked to, you never will. How all of these people that have been in the background of your life these past 720 days will cease to be a part of it.