Over the course of four years, as cheesy as this sounds, you had to look inside yourself to discover your interests and realize that you cannot be truly satisfied by letting others define you. At times, I can speak for myself with this, we can be standing at a crossroads between doing the right thing, and doing what seemed “cool” or what would make us “fit in”. Or we would be fixated on doing things to impress others even though it wasn’t what we truly wanted. Don’t let others define you. Only you can define who you are.
Mother Theresa explained this perfectly when she said:
“People are often unreasonable and self-centered, forgive them anyway. If you are kind, people may accuse you of ulterior motives, be kind anyway, If you are honest, people may cheat you, be honest anyway. If you find happiness, people may be jealous, be happy anyway. The good you do today may be forgotten, do good anyway. Give the world your best and it may never be enough, do your best anyway, for you see, in the end, it is between you and God. It was never between you and them anyway.”
Now for some words of wisdom. To the up and coming freshmen: high school is what you make it. It can be the best four years of your life or it can be the worst; it just depends on your mentality. To the up and coming sophomores: you’ve survived one year of high school; you've got three more left and only one year left of being an underclassman.
To the up and coming juniors: congrats, you are now an upperclassman and half way done with high school. These next two years will be filled with AP classes, college applications, and prom. To the up and coming seniors: I have one piece of advice. Don’t wish away your senior year. No matter how hard the homework gets or how strenuous the workload is, don’t wish for time to go by faster. You only have one senior year, so you might as well make the most of it while you’re still here with all of your friends.
For the upcoming graduates: you almost made it. You're so close. Now that you're graduating high school, you all welcome a greater journey into our lives: the real world. Whether that leads you on the path to college, the workforce, or the military, there needs to be one common goal; to make a difference. One person can impact so many with just a smile or a simple “hello”. All of you are capable of accomplishing great things, now it’s time to show the world what we are made of. High school isn't forever, but the memories that you've made over the past four years are forever.
