When I was in high school, I was a total type A, even though I didn't know that particular term at the time. I wasn't exactly a teacher's pet, but I wasn't too far from it. I did all my homework on time, I was in almost all the top classes (math was never my forte), and I was always on high honor roll--and it was exhausting. For the most part, I liked excelling. It gave me a sense of accomplishment, and I knew I was working toward an important goal: college, the institution portrayed as the end-all, be-all of every American student's educational career. After a while, though, none of it seemed worth it.
I knew I was over the whole 'school' thing, but I didn't realise just how much I hated it until my senior year. I had both high school and college classes, an internship through my BOCES program, and a job, and I was spread pretty thin. I would look around at some of my classmates who didn't show up until fourth period, wearing sweatpants and talking about how they'd just come from getting breakfast, and I envied them. More often than not, if I was invited to hang out with friends I declined by default, because if I didn't have to be at my job I would be doing homework. I tried to stay motivated by telling myself that I would be more prepared than some of my peers because I would be accustomed to such a heavy work load, and that would make it worth it, wouldn't it?
When I got my college acceptance letter, my first reaction was relief. My first-choice school took so long to send me anything that I was convinced I hadn't gotten in. My second reaction was excitement. I had been hearing about college for as long as I could remember, and I was finally going to be able to experience it for myself. My third reaction was disappointment. I'd gotten this far and, really, what did I have to show for it besides a good high school transcript? I thought back to my sophomore year, when I had anxiety attacks about school so frequently that I had trouble sleeping. I remembered hearing one of my friends say, after I told her how much homework I had daily in my AP U.S. History class, "We never have homework in my class. Why did you make it so hard for yourself?" I thought about how often I was doing schoolwork instead of sleeping, or spending time with my family, or taking time for myself.
I started to question my whole future plan. I'd been in school for 13 years, and a piece of paper detailing what I'd done with the last four years (not to mention a "promising future") was all I had. I was convinced that I was really only good at school. When I graduated, I saw it as a ceremony that symbolised being set free rather than a celebration of academic achievement. I hadn't really given that much thought to what I wanted to do after high school because I focused so much on getting through it, but there wasn't anything I could do to change that. I just wished I'd had more fun and not taken everything so seriously.
I do have fun stories from high school. I did lots of things that didn't involve textbooks and flash cards. I did band and chorus, I was in drum line, I performed in plays and musicals, and I did volunteer work. I even went to some awkward school dances, and the occasional football game. I'm not going to make the same claim that everybody else does, that high school makes up the best years of your life, for two reasons: 1) I'm not even 20 years old yet, and there's no logical way for me to make that comparison, and 2) I sure hope not. But I will say that I wish I'd listened when parents or older friends told me that I would hardly care about anything that I'd cared about in high school once I graduated, because they were absolutely right. I wish I'd taken more mental health days, eased up on the accelerated classes, and taken more weekends off, because a good high school transcript is worth a lot, but it isn't worth everything.
