I visited my suburban hometown this weekend on a whim to see some old friends from high school. I was expecting to catch up on their lives and have a few laughs over old memories. What I wasn't expecting was the overwhelming feeling of nostalgia that greeted me as soon as I entered my dear old suburbia.
That got me thinking: Did I peak in high school? Will I ever feel the same sense of limited stress that I did when I was fourteen? And, most importantly, do I ever want to feel that way again?
I think, for the most part, our lives become busier as we grow up. Money and relationships grow more serious as the timeline of how we want our life to look looms over our shoulders. Will we graduate on time? Will our student loans ruin our mental health or our physical health first? Are the people we're surrounding ourselves with right now people we want to be in our lives forever?
All throughout high school, I was begging the clock to speed up. I knew that what I wanted from the world was outside the steps of my high school, and I could feel the potential almost in my grasp. But there were moments that I wish I had cherished more, like when all of my friends and I were together under one zip code for longer than a weekend. Or when I could drive around care-free on a Sunday, knowing that I could do something productive with my day, but I didn't have to. I didn't realize that there were so many moments during my high school years that I would take for granted and miss someday all because I was dead-set on getting out of suburban purgatory.
Obviously, not everyone liked high school. Most people don't. I didn't even like high school. I would complain about how everything was so cookie-cutter and fake, and a lot of the times, it was. But sometimes I look at all of the life-changing decisions I have in store for me within the next few years and wish I had appreciated being a kid more. I don't miss being in the classroom or in my school necessarily, but I sometimes long for the days when my mom was closer than a phone call away and I could stop by my best friend's house whenever I needed a shoulder to cry on.
So OK, high school wasn't great. But a lot of the people during that time period of my life were.
