After 13 years of spending 8 hours a day in school, I can finally say that I’m done. I’ve been imaging this day for years, the feeling of finally being free to do whatever I want whenever I want, not having to follow a strict schedule, and not be constantly told what to do. That day finally came, and it’s exactly how I hoped to feel.
I'll miss high school, but I'm a hell of a lot more glad that it's over.
Usually when you tell adults that you can’t wait for high school to be over, you get a response along the lines of ‘you’ll miss high school when you’re older’. I don’t know if it’s the new-graduate in me talking but I can’t imagine that EVER happening.
Through high school, all of us have days when we feel really sick of the whole idea. For most people, this feeling gets more intense towards senior year. Whether you like your teachers or not, whether you have a solid group of friends or not, there comes times when you get tired of the people, the drama, the stress, the environment, and just want to walk out the door and never come back. But each day of resisting that urge gets you closer to that final day.
high school is hard.
In high school, you have a limited group of people around you all the time. There are usually different groups of people that seem to have stepped out of a movie to play the stereotypical high school gangs. I remember when I first came to high school, I assumed that it could not possibly really be like the movies make it out to be, human beings couldn’t really categorize themselves as the stereotypical groups we grew up watching on tv; the nerds, the jocks, the populars, the outsiders, etc. but I came to find out that while some schools follow this model more strongly than others, they all have at least a bit of it.
But let’s forget about the people, the purpose of school is education after all, isn’t it? Don’t get me wrong, I definitely learnt a lot in high school. I don’t doubt that I would not be the person I am today without the things I learnt. But for all the things I learnt, there’s an equal amount of things I forgot the second after a test, which makes me wonder why we studied them in the first place.
With all the social pressure, the essays, exams, pressure coming from all around for you to get good grades, while doing enough extracurriculars, and still maintaining a social life, and somehow managing to get enough sleep, and going through all that while your teenage hormones and emotions are all over the place is hard. No matter how much adults complain that we don’t know how hard ‘real life’ is, high school is difficult. You don’t compare the difficulty of a child learning to draw a perfect circle with that of an experienced artist learning to perfect their portraiture technique. They are both equally challenging, for the person doing it.
Freedom:
When you graduate, it feels like the world is yours. You can do anything, be anything, accomplish anything you want. It really does feel like you’re finally free. But I don’t want to feel like I’m temporarily fantasising, I want to believe I’ll feel this way forever. The calming, yet exciting feeling of graduating is probably one of the best feelings I’ve experienced in my life.
What's next?
I am so excited about life after high school! While I’ll be starting university this fall, my art and blog can now become a much bigger part of my life. I have a lot of plans, the first of which started with creating this website, and there’s much more to come! It’s amazing to think that some of you have been following my journey and supporting me throughout my four years of high school, and now onto college, and I can’t wait to share more of myself and my journey with you, and get to know you more!
Have you graduated already? Or are you going to graduate soon? let me know below!