All through eighth grade you prepare to graduate and move onto high school. Everyone tells you how the next four years of your life will be the best four years of your life. After hearing it so many times, you start to believe it. You prepare yourself for the best four years, creating billions of different scenarios of how the rest of you childhood will play out. And yes, childhood is the right word, because you are still a child when you're in high school. Despite all of your new responsibilities, you are not as grown up as you like to think you are.
Once the day comes, you pack your backpack and wear the outfit you picked out weeks ago and excitedly head to school; the script for the day that you already wrote is playing in your head over and over. Then you get to school and the scenario doesn't play out quite the way you planned. But hey, it's gonna be the "best four years of your life" so you just go with it. A few weeks pass and everything is going pretty well but it's not the best.
So you wait and wait and wait.
You wait for the big moment, the one that will make you popular, the one that will change everything, the moment that you can finally see how this is the best four years. You continue to come up with different scenarios, you try talking to different people, maybe test out a new sport, attend a party, anything to make it the best years. You test the limits, you make a ton of mistakes, and you wonder at which point it'll become the best years of your life.
High school is fun, don't get me wrong. It's four years filled with new friendships, new responsibilities, and new ideas but it's not the best four years of your life and going in with that mindset will only ruin the experience. It might sound a little pessimistic but labeling something before they even begin is not the best idea. If you think something has to be the best, then you'll spend the entire time trying to make it the best and you'll miss out on all the little things. And the same goes for college. By labeling these years ahead of time you put way too much pressure on yourself and those around you.
Maybe instead of labeling a time period as the best before it even begins we should just take each day as it and let the best days be the best days and the bad ones be the bad ones and not label a certain time period as better than the rest before they even begin.
