Everyone says that high school will be the best four years of your life. While they may not actually be the best, they are still going to be some of the better years. These are the years that you get to be a kid. You have little, to no responsibility, you see your friends on a daily basis, and believe it or not, this is the easiest that you will ever have it in life. After high school, all of that changes. You go to college or start working an adult job and you’re hit with responsibilities from all directions. It’s still possible to have a good time after high school, but it’s a whole new world after graduation.
In high school, I couldn’t wait to graduate and get out. I would always complain about taking classes that I didn’t want to take, having to be around people that weren’t my favorite people ever, and not being able to wait to get out of my small town and move on to something bigger and better. I always said that I would never miss high school. Don’t get me wrong, I love college and what I’m doing with my life right now, but I did the unthinkable and started to miss high school. I miss the sports I was involved in and spending time with my teammates after school every day. I miss seeing my friends between classes and eating lunch with them. I miss the comfort of knowing that the classes I was taking wouldn’t have much if any influence on my future. I miss being able to just be a kid. Now I have a job, exams to study for almost every other week, commitments to student organizations, an internship, and many other responsibilities. I thought I was stressed out in high school, but all of these things brought a whole new definition to being stressed out and I find myself longing for the more simple days.
From the position of a stressed out college student, the best advice I can give you is to stop wanting to grow up so fast. Go to the football games on Friday night and yell from the student section. Stop skipping school dances and go dance with your friends like you have no cares in the world and nobody is watching. Join a club or a team just for shits and giggles because you have nothing better to do. Slow down and appreciate everything that high school has to offer you because life will never be so simple again. A lot of you, if you’re anything like me, take so much of your high school years for granted and dwell on how badly you want to graduate and move on. And if you’re anything like me, you’ll look back on your high school years and wish that you did more fun things while you could. You’ll wish you appreciated it more and didn’t take it for granted so much. You’ll wish that you could go back and be a kid all over again because being an adult just isn’t as easy.
