My high school was an old, grand brick building on the top of a hill. Most people who have seen it say it doesn’t look like a “classical” high school with its wood floors and old beam work and windows that go from the ceiling to the floor. It looks more like an old Victorian mansion with the occasional room and carpet straight from the '70s (and they smell like they’re from the '70s). With only 200 kids in the entire school (all from the woods of Vermont), the entire place screamed rural.
I’m always told how lucky I was to go there — how lucky I was to go to such a beautiful, tight-knit school for four years. Sometimes, I agree with them; I agree that I was lucky to have the teachers I did, the experiences I had and the drama department I was a part of.
Though, more often than not, going to my high school on the hill did not feel like a lucky experience.
For many teenagers and young adults, high school can have two, vastly opposing associations with its name. For some, high school will always be known as their “glory years” of parties and friends, and, for others, high school is the awkward blemish tarnishing the resume of our lives. High school, in its entirety, is like a true manifestation of an '80s movie: in one corner, there are the single-characteristic jocks shoving the nerds in the locker, and in the other corner, are the glasses-wearing nerds now stuck in locker number 75. The same movie, it seemed, would play across the country in one hallway to the next.
While I wouldn’t say I’m firmly on one side or the other with my high school experience, I wouldn’t say high school was entirely layered with happy memories for me — especially my senior year. In fact, my senior year, more often than not, seems associated with sadness. I can still remember the weight I would go to school with, the utter lack of feeling I would experience, the desire to just be back in bed instead of walking on those wood floors. Though I was good at hiding it, this sadness of mine. So good, in fact, no one asked me about it. No one really asked me about anything.
I can still remember walking up and down this one hallway in my high school, the one sloping hall with scuffed up, yellowing tiles connecting our cafeteria to our library. Throughout my senior year, I would walk up and down the hall for an hour, slowly eating my lunch, praying for the minutes to go by faster. I would take slow, deliberate steps, trying to waste time as I would only take a few bites of my food, too sick with anxiety to ever finish a meal. Though I would never walk too close to the grand doors of the cafeteria or the open windows of the library; I would never chance making eye contact with the groups of friends eating together. Every day, every minute, every step reminded me that I had no one to sit with — that it seemed like no one cared. I still question if people did.
For me, high school is laced with the memories that still compact my chest when I think about them, so you can imagine how thrilled I was about visiting it last Friday.
I was there to see my old drama club (one of the best experiences in high school I had), put on "Legally Blonde" the musical. With mom at my side and my old high school friends waiting for me in the auditorium, I walked through the doors of the place that I had come to associate with pain.
When you step back into your high school for the first time since starting college, you can’t help but be struck with how much older you feel. You look into the faces of your former peers and they seem so young, so inexperienced, even though you’ve only been at college for a few months. Those kids, well, you can’t help but look at them and think just wait until you see what’s out there.
The second thing that will hit you is that your high school doesn’t feel like a different world now that you’ve been at a different school for a few months. The halls you lived in for the past four years, well, they still look like the same old, tread-upon, dirty hallways. You don’t step back into a memory, but a routine you simply haven’t performed in a while.
The third thing that will happen is the “Is that Grace Safford?” portion of the evening. You will, without a doubt, be bombarded with old teachers and old acquaintances, and they will ask the same questions in the same order: “How’s college?” “Must be so different from here, huh?” “Did you cut your hair?” “How are your classes?” “How long are you staying for? We should catch up.”
The fourth thing you will experience is that emotion — the remembrance of the “glory days,” or the crushing feeling that washes over you when you think of who laughed at you in that classroom, or who didn’t meet you for lunch in that corner they said they would. I was surprised at how my eyes automatically went to the entrance to the hallway, the bend that would lead to where I spent so many days wearing a track into the ground. It was like it was calling me, asking me to feel that sadness again, to even further cement this school in my mind as a small hell on a hill.
Though the fifth thing you will experience are the memories — the good memories. When I watched my old drama club up on the stage that had become my second home throughout high school, I was bombarded with images: me laughing as I was dragged across the stage as I played a drunk lion, me sitting on my friend after faking wrestling with him, me standing center stage in 18 plays and me crying as I did my final curtain call. The memories I had were superimposed upon the play I was watching, my own old smiling face matching the ones I saw on stage. I almost cried at the curtain call for "Legally Blonde." When I was a freshman in drama club, there were only about 13 people in our club. "Legally Blonde" had a cast of 50 people.
When I saw that cast, when I saw how happy they were, I no longer wanted to see that hallway, I no longer wanted to walk on its yellow tiles one more time. I finally, slowly, started to remember the good in my school on the hill.
As my friend, Margot, says, “You cannot impose your pain upon others. You cannot make them hurt just because you hurt — it’s not fair to them.” I haven’t been fair to my old high school. I have been subjecting my pain upon it; I have been solely associating it with the sadness that crippled me for months and months last year. It wasn’t a horrible place; it wasn’t hell on a hill. It was far from that. It was a place that helped me get to where I am today into college with loving friends, amazing classes, and with a happiness that always keeps me moving forward. It was a stepping stone in my life, a stepping stone that was filled with learning, amazing people, and amazing experiences. In my sadness, and frankly, my anger, I had lost the reasons I had loved my school among sour memories.
After going to my high school for the first time since college, I can say this with confidence: visit your high school at least once after you graduate. Whether you’re from one spectrum or the other in terms of the feelings you had towards your experience, you should still step through those old front doors one more time. You will see the good in your life, you will see the happy memories and you’ll get one step closer to getting rid of the weight you have been carrying since high school. Go to your high school, purge yourself of your negativity and let yourself experience one of the most influential periods in your life once more before it’s too late.
